Physics Buzz

"When there is a storm, and you stand in front of a tree—if you look at its branches, you swear it will fall. But if you look at the trunk, you will see its stability."

Originally published : Aug 25 2014 - 10:30am, Inside Science News Service By: Katharine Gammon, Contributor ( Inside Science ) -- Woodpeckers are some of the most industrious birds in nature. Their intense tapping -- all an elaborate effort to procure food -- can happen as rapidly as 20 pecks per second, with each strike transmitting a seemingly brain-rattling force of up to 1,200 times the force of gravity at Earth's surface. Yet, despite those repetitive impacts, woodpeckers typically show none of the typical signs of head trauma. How do their brains endure this? Their remarkable ability to absorb shock has made woodpeckers a favorite species to study for biology-inspired materials and design. Now, a new analysis shows that the bird's body stores most of the energy created in the pecking – and the understanding could lead to better helmets, cars or armor. Wu Chengwei, a mechanical engineer at Dalian University of Technology in northeastern China, used CT scans of th

In January, researchers announced that decades of fishing has  decimated  the bluefin tuna population by over 90 percent. Just days earlier , one such Pacific bluefin tuna sold for $1.76 million at an auction in Tokyo. The bluefin tuna can weigh over 1,000 lbs and swims at speeds over 50 mph. While most remain in the eastern Pacific waters off the coast of Japan, some bluefin species migrate across the Pacific to the coast of California. More than 90 percent of bluefin tuna are caught before they have reproduced, severely damaging the population.  Image Credit: Aziz Saltik Climate change, overfishing, and other ecological changes can push wild animal populations towards extinction. For years, scientists have observed changing wildlife populations and seek to measure the risk of population collapse in order to preemptively protect endangered species. Now, a team of physicists at MIT have demonstrated that variations in population density may accurately reflect the population

Almost one year ago, several physicists from Imperial College London and the University of London released one of the most highly-praised papers on the foundations of quantum mechanics in recent years. Essentially, the researchers had provided strong evidence that the quantum state is, in fact, real. Furthermore, this suggested that the quantum state is not merely a reflection of an observer's knowledge of a system, as some physicists and philosophers have argued. Image courtesy Cornell University Library/ Arxiv.org Terry Rudolph, one of the authors of the paper, decided to submit his paper to perhaps the most prominent interdisciplinary scientific journal: Nature . Additionally, he posted his work to the popular arXiv preprint server. After reaching a very late stage in the editorial process, the paper was rejected. The reason, according to Nature, was follow-up research that Rudolph posted on the arXiv which cast doubt on the original research. Rudolph, however, thought th