Physics Buzz

As a beautiful fall day rustles by outside, a physics student stands in the classroom with an arm held out over his lab table, clutching a fistful of matches. He holds them tight, palm upward, over a sheet of graph paper, on which he's painstakingly drawn a series of parallel lines, separated by a distance just larger than the length of the matchsticks. With an uncertain frown, he looks around at his peers, some of whom are already hunched over the tables, busy counting. With a shrug, the student tosses the fistful of matches up into the air, trying desperately to strike a balance between control and chaos—he's got to land as many of them on the page as he can, while still ensuring that they end up oriented at a suitably random scatter of angles.

Most of us aren’t very comfortable thinking about randomness. People like five-year plans and the comfort of “everything happens for a reason.” Even the messy among us claim there’s order in their chaos. Despite this, many processes that are fundamental to our way of life rely on random numbers. Random numbers are key to stock market predictions, the security behind online shopping, and the integrity of clinical research trials. Last week in The Optical Society’s journal Optica , a team of scientists introduced a new device for generating random numbers that is based on the quantum mechanical properties of light. It is a record-breaking combination of security, size, and speed.

Like a complex highway system, a network of vessels carries blood from the heart to all corners of your body and back again. This “distribution network” is not only complicated, it is also huge and astoundingly efficient. Even when one part of the body is injured, flow to and from the rest of the body is rarely interrupted.

It is New Year's Eve and, somewhere in Scandinavia, a family sits around a small table, illuminated by candlelight, speaking to one another in subdued tones. On the table, an ornate spoon rests in a small silver stand, its head sitting above an open candle flame. Next to it, a stainless steel bowl of cool water seems to be full of shadow in the dim and directional light coming from the candles. As a light snow begins to fall outside the windows, an ingot of metal is placed in the spoon, and a small child stands on his chair to watch it melt while the rest of the family looks on with an air of pleasant expectancy. Before long, the ingot is a small molten pool of lead and tin in the spoon. In this family, tradition dictates that the youngest goes first. With gentle encouragement from the rest, the child reaches out to grab the spoon by its handle. His mother's hand hovers around his, not touching but following, ready to grab the handle in case he slips or loses his grip, but his

Foster, from the USA wants to know: Could the tens of thousands of windmills across the United States be at least partially responsible for the recent change in weather patterns, and particularly the drought in California? I know energy is conserved, so I have to wonder what effect it has on weather patterns when we start introducing massive energy sinks in high-wind areas. Wouldn't it cause more air to flow around the farms?

Once every century or so, a supernova occurs somewhere in the Milky Way, blasting out as much energy in one event as a sun-like star emits over billions of years. According to a paper recently accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters, the level of antimatter in the vacuum of our solar system makes it look like one of these supernovas happened pretty close to home, and not too long ago.

Mathematics that can describe coffeepots, forest fires and flu outbreaks may also underpin the brain’s response to anesthesia, a new study suggests.

Next month, a new disaster thriller starring Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson will hit theaters, plunging audiences into chaos and destruction following a magnitude nine earthquake on the San Andreas fault. There’s nothing wrong with encouraging earthquake preparedness , but, as the new trailers make abundantly clear, San Andreas promises to be packed with far-fetched ideas about how earthquakes (as well as tsunamis ) work. To find out what Californians should and shouldn’t be worried about — and why — we spoke with Dr. Belle Philibosian, an earthquake geologist at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, who studies the seismic potential of fault systems. Philibosian has seen her fair share of Hollywood earthquake myths, starting with 1978’s Superman , in which Lex Luthor attempts to trigger the San Andreas fault with a nuclear bomb in a sinister plot to create beachfront property in the desert.

Understanding wrinkles begins with math. Originally published: Apr 6 2015 - 9:00am, Inside Science News Service By: Peter Gwynne, Contributor ( Inside Science ) – From raisins to fingerprints, and from tree bark to the surface of the brain, wrinkles appear throughout nature. But scientists have struggled to explain how wrinkles form. Now two independent research teams at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge have developed key insights into the process. One group has developed a mathematical theory, confirmed experimentally, that predicts how wrinkles take shape on curved surfaces. The other explains in more general terms how layered materials form different types of wrinkly patterns. Image credit: Changyong Cao and Xuanhe Zhao

On the podcast this week, we're delving into entropy , the thermodynamic property that causes heat to flow into cooler areas, buildings to degrade away and ultimately the heat death of the universe . In essence, entropy is how much disorder or randomness there is in a system. This year is an important year for entropy too, it's been 150 years exactly since physicist Rudolf Clausius first published his paper that coined the term "entropy," and formalized what it was, and how it behaved. The idea of entropy had been around since the early 1800s when scientists like  Lazare Carnot first started to realize that in any action, some amount of energy was bing lost. Perpetual motion machines are impossible because some of their energy is inevitably lost to friction and heat. Perpetual motion machines are as old as science itself, and they all have one thing in common. They don't work.

Originally published: Mar 20 2015 - 2:15pm, Inside Science News Service By: Ben P. Stein, Director ( Inside Science ) -- Testing whether a drug is safe and effective usually takes many years and millions of dollars. Now, researchers have discovered a surprisingly simple method that could quickly and inexpensively weed out many toxic drugs early in the testing process. The test simply explores how much a drug alters a cell's outer covering, or membrane. Pharmaceutical companies go to great lengths to find out if a drug is toxic to humans. After test tube and animal trials, researchers move to trials with people. Even human trials, however, don’t always catch drugs that have toxic or unexpected effects on some people. Image credit: motorolka via shutterstock | http://shutr.bz/19FdUBc Inside The Cell Researchers from the Weill Cornell Medical College and Rockefeller University, both in New York City, have developed a simple method that successfully flagged more than ha

In 1997, when Cindy Kelly learned of the impending demolition of the V Site at Los Alamos, the cluster of wooden structures in which the plutonium bomb detonated in the first nuclear test was assembled, she acted quickly . Leaving her position at the Department of Energy in 2000, she founded the Atomic Heritage Foundation to raise awareness and gather partners to preserve the Manhattan Project sites. The partially assembled “Gadget” atop its 100-ft. tower prior to the Trinity Test. Image Credit: DOE/Public Domain Fifteen years later, these efforts have paid off, as Congress passed and the President signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on December 19, 2014. The NDAA, which sets the budget for the Department of Defense each year, contained a special provision this time around to authorize a Manhattan Project National Historical Park . The X-10 Graphite Reactor at Oak Ridge. Image Credit: DOE/Public Domain

Could life as we know it have developed if fundamental physics constants were different? Originally published: Feb 20 2015 - 12:15pm, Inside Science News Service By: Gabriel Popkin, Contributor ( Inside Science ) -- For all the progress physicists have made in figuring out the universe, they still don't know some pretty basic things. Why, for example, do fundamental particles possess the specific values of mass that they have? Presently, physicists have no explanation for this and similar questions. They do know something pretty significant, however. If the masses of particles or the values of fundamental constants were much different from what physicists have measured, carbon-based intelligent beings might not be here to measure them, because fundamental particles might not assemble into stable atoms, atoms might not form rocky planets and dying stars might not produce the chemical elements we find in our bodies. These observations have led some physicists to describe t

This fall, a new primetime drama appeared on the television network WGN America, featuring scientists at Los Alamos working tirelessly--desperately, even--to develop nuclear weapons during World War II, all while maintaining utmost secrecy. Manhattan draws on the rich underlying history of its namesake, the Manhattan Project, but steers clear of documentary tendencies. Whereas the premise of the show and several key figures are largely based on their real-life counterparts, the main cast is populated by fictional characters, whose personal and scientific struggles acquaint us with the broader themes of privacy, government surveillance, and trust. Today on the podcast , we discuss how Manhattan brings nuclear physics to primetime TV, and what’s gained or lost along the way. A replica of the Fat Man bomb detonated over Nagasaki during WWII. Image Credit: US Department of Defense Jennifer Ouellette , science writer and former director of the Science and Entertainment Exchang

Over the past decade, citizen science projects have been popping up in every conceivable discipline, evolving with the internet to bring the power of the public to bear on increasingly large datasets. Astronomy has a long history of amateur involvement, and many projects are now up and running to process piles of data from space telescopes, sky surveys, and planetary orbiters. Today on the podcast , we take a look at a few of these projects to find out why they’re so useful and what drives citizen scientists to volunteer. Dr. Andrew Westphal of Berkeley’s Space Science Laboratories is the project director and principal investigator for Stardust@home , an effort to find rare interstellar particles embedded in the aerogel detector returned from NASA’s Stardust mission in 2006. In part, volunteers (or “dusters”) are motivated by competition, as their pattern recognition chops are evaluated and reported in real time.  An aerogel collector for the Stardust mission. The Stardust

For this week's podcast, we've dug up an old podcast that we published last year (originally published July 24, 2013). For those that missed it, the podcast covered the physics behind a world like Westeros: the setting for the hit HBO show Game of Thrones. Westeros has highly variable seasons that come at differing times, most notably the impending winter (it's coming!). We spoke with an astrophysicist to see if there could be exoplanets that exhibit similar seasons to this fictional world. Enjoy!

Every year, we travel to our local Six Flags to collect g-force data on some of its most popular roller coasters. Although we compile the data, the true scientists of the day are local high school students who wear accelerometers on four of the park's thrilling rides. To include those of you who couldn't make it to this year's event earlier this month, we shared our data last week  and quizzed you on your knowledge of roller coaster physics. And this week we're sharing a different data set: the photos from another successful Six Flags Physics Day in 2014 . Enjoy! One of several inversions on the Apocalypse ride. Be sure to check out the ride accelerometer data too. Image Credit : Matt Payne/SPS/AIP Brave students taking data on the Apocalypse ride. Image Credit : Matt Payne/SPS/AIP Volunteers prepare the accelerometer data for the students. Image Credit : Matt Payne/SPS/AIP Another view of the Apocalypse ride. Be sure to check out the g-force da

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

Originally published : Apr 2 2014 - 4:00pm, Inside Science News Service By : Joel N. Shurkin, ISNS Contributor ( ISNS ) -- In most hurricanes the greatest damage is done not by the wind but from the storm surge, the mountain of water pushed by raging winds from the ocean to deluge the land. There is always a level of unpredictability when dealing with Mother Nature, but knowing where the water would go when a storm is bearing down on the coast would be useful, particularly in densely populated coastal cities such as New York, which maintains complex systems of houses, office buildings, sidewalks, basements, alleys, subway stations, and streets clogged with parked cars. Scientists at the College of William & Mary’s Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences at Gloucester Point, Va., reported they have a computer model that may do that, starting about 30 hours before the storm comes ashore. At least it worked in retrospect with the Hurricane Sandy, which devastated the East Coast i

The Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory 's (PPPL) new experiment appears to be operated by a ghost: It will turn on by itself and emit a purplish glow without any researchers flipping a switch. In fact, physicists at the lab aren't even using the experiment. Instead, people from around the world now have direct control of the experiment through their laptops, and you can too. PPPL's Remote Glow Discharge Experiment is housed in New Jersey, but you can turn it on, tweak its voltages and control its pressure with your web browser from anywhere in the world. As you conduct your own studies, a live webcam will show how your adjustments influence the experiment. If you do it right, you'll be able to make the experiment glow like in the picture below. As PPPL's Head of Science Education Andrew Zwicker told me at the APS Division of Plasma Physics meeting last November, "It's just really cool." A screengrab of the experiment's webcam I took