Physics Buzz

Engineering designer Vic Tandy had just seen a ghost.  That, or he was losing his mind, he thought.

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,

Murky water is an excellent cloak, masking underwater features and objects from view. Sound can pierce straight through the murk by traveling around suspended particles in the water with minimal scattering. But sound's penetrating ability, thanks to its relatively long wavelengths, also means that it is difficult to "see" underwater objects in any detail. Scientists are currently developing a new sonar technique that can image objects only a few inches in size. For more than a hundred years , scientists have used  sonar (SOund Navigation And Ranging) to pierce underwater depths, but the most common technique, called side-scan sonar , works best on very large objects like shipwrecks or the contours of the ocean floor. Image of the shipwreck "Aid" in Estonia using side-scan sonar. Credit: Subzone OÜ via Wikimedia Commons

This award winning film lets you experience what happens when solar wind slams into Earth's magnetosphere. The results are downright spooky. This is the short film 20hz , based on data from the CARISMA  radio telescope array during a geo-magnetic storm in Earth's upper atmosphere. The researchers converted the radio signals picked up by the telescope array into audible sounds, which the filmmakers then turned into a visual representation. It garnered first place in the 2014 Quantum Shorts film contest put on by the Center for Quantum Technologies at the National University of Singapore . Since 2012, the center has invited aspiring filmmakers to put together short films based on or inspired by the weirdness of quantum phenomena.

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 .

What is the nature of the solar wind, and how is it so powerful as to affect us here on Earth? This is an artist's rendering of solar wind -- plasma from the sun that is always blowing, causing space weather -- hitting the Earth's magnetic field. Usually, Earth's magnetic shields us from the solar wind, directing the sun's plasma to the poles, which we see as auroras such as this one from above Bear Lake, Alaska.

Alan Alda  started the Flame Challenge in 2012 to get scientists and science enthusiasts to explain complex topics to 11-year-olds. "What is a Flame?" was the first question, followed the next year by "What is Time?" The winner of this year's question , "What is Color?" was Dianna Cowern, aka Physics Girl , and we're talking to her on this week's podcast.

The Golden Age of comic books stretched from the 1930s through the 1950s and overlapped with a time of unbridled optimism about the progress of science. People wanted to know about how the latest technology worked, and LOTS of people wanted to read comic books, so putting the two together seems like a no-brainer. Comic Book Plus is an amazing archive of public domain comics from this era. sprinkled amongst long forgotten titles like Lars of Mars  and  The Adventures of Captain Havoc and The Phantom Knight  are a plethora of scanned comic books about real science. They run the gamut. Some are illuminating, funny and really helpful while others are just weird, wildly inaccurate and are terribly dated. So, my list of the top seven public domain science comics worth reading are... 7- How Atomic Energy Works  Golly wilikers! Who wouldn't wanna learn how atomic energy works from a man in a fedora?! In all seriousness, this Bill Cosmo character is a bit over eager to tell little

When you’re talking with people at a noisy restaurant, it’s usually not too hard pick out your friend’s voice over the din. Humans, and really all mammals, have this talent to isolate and focus on certain sounds while suppressing others. It’s a complicated feat that happens mostly in the ear. Now, scientists at the Institute for Neuroinformatics developed a mathematical model to use computers to reproduce this ability.  In order to hear your friend talking, sound waves enter your ear canal and transfer to the cochlea. Inside, the sound waves wiggle thousands of tiny hair cells, sending electrical impulses to the brain. But they don't just pass along data — they're also able to enhance weak signals that need amplifying.  Sound waves come in the ear canal, vibrate the tympanic membrane, and are then transferred into the cochlea. Thousands of hair cells inside the cochlea then transmit electrical pulses to the brain. Image Credit:  Inductiveload .  To mimic our ear

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

Common kitchen item erases wall's barrier to sound Image credit : Karlowac | Shutterstock.com Rights information : http://shutr.bz/122UxtQ Originally published : Jun 20 2013, Inside Science News Service By: Peter Gwynne, ISNS Contributor (ISNS) – A team of Japanese and South Korean researchers has devised a means of making solid walls virtually transparent to sound. The process relies on drilling small holes in a rigid material, such as a wall, and covering them on one side by a membrane made from the plastic wrap found in any kitchen. "The wall with the bare holes seriously hinders the transmission," the team reported in the June 13 issue of Physical Review Letters . "[B]ut with the membrane installed the transmission becomes, as expected, almost as good as with no wall."

Many commuters can relate to the common plight of cracked windshields. The ride may be going smoothly until a pop signals a small crack in the corner of the windshield — a small crack that will soon radiate into a spider-like obstruction. Recently, researchers from Aix-Marseille University in Marseille, France published research on this topic, and they revealed a relatively simple relationship between the velocity of an impacting object and the number of radial cracks in the glass. Nicolas Vandenberghe and his colleagues found that the number of cracks is proportional to the square root of the impact speed for small steel projectiles hitting samples of plexiglass. For example, quadrupling the speed of a small rock would double the number of triangular cracks emanating from the impact site. While this may provide little solace for an angry motorist, the research may prove useful in ballistics testing, forensics, and even protecting spacecraft from the dangers of the cosmos.

Early Friday morning, a streaking meteor illuminated the sky over Chelyabinsk, Russia. Seconds later, meteorite debris pummeled the city, injuring over 900 people . A shcokwave from the meteor's higher altitude explosions also cracked as it reached the ground and shattered glass windows. Below are a few videos of the incident as compiled by redditors "Therecanonlybetwo" and "hattmarington," respectively. The first video shows the meteor streaking across the sky from the view of a dashcam. The second video captured the booming shockwave's arrival on ground level and the subsequent damage.

There's a British invasion afoot today. The BBC science show "Bang Goes the Theory" premieres tonight on BBC America. So how does this show distinguish itself from the abundance of other educational science shows on TV today? Part of the appeal stems from a selection of awesome experiments. In the first episode, for instance, the show's presenters experimented with an enormous vortex cannon and a fire tornado generator (something we've done in the past ). But there's more to this show than just cool experiments; the team also interviews leaders in science and technology for short magazine-style segments. The show seems like a cross between 60 minutes and Mythbusters, sprinkled with British accents.