Swans on Tea

17 cool magnet tricks
I’ve done several of these, including a version of the homopolar motor. The eddy current damping is fun, too — you can make nonmagnetic metals react to magnets by inducing current flow in them. Lenz’s law.

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Atmospheric pressure is about 10 N/cm^2, but there are a whole lot of square centimeters on that tanker — the more familiar unit is N/m^2 (Pascals), where 1 atmosphere is 101325 Pa (or possibly even more familiar 14.7 psi).
Various sites showing this have claims [...]

Constructing a bacon-plasma torch which can cut through steel. Ok, thin steel, but geez!
Bacon: the Other White Heat
And, to balance the diet,
A cucumber makes an even better edible thermal-lance housing, since its outer rind contains the pressure of the very hot flame without burning up

One of the things we’re investigating is pulsed laser systems, because they’re fun, but (especially for funding purposes) also because they are the basis of optical frequency combs (as I’ve mentioned). And things are pulsing along. One of the things that was noticed was that light from the pulsed system, running at 1560 [...]

Skulls in the Stars: Levitation and diamagnetism, or: LEAVE EARNSHAW ALONE!!!
It’s hard to tell if the author is being snarky or really looks upon mathematical physics as a “mumbojumbo” that impedes progress. Taking the statement at face value, it highlights an important and semi-common misunderstanding of many physics theorems, and so I thought I’d [...]

“Superionic” Buckyball Crystal
A team of researchers from Italy, Hungary, and the UK reasoned that buckyballs bonded into a crystal structure, like stacked fruit, would generate a material with big spaces in between the spheres. “To create large channels, we need large building blocks,” says team member Mauro Riccò of the University of Parma in Italy. [...]

A few days ago I was relating the cans-in-a-blanket problem, and retelling the vacuum joke and story to someone who had not yet heard them. One of my colleagues commented on a problem he had been given during an interview, also involving cans of soda:
You have two cans, one filled with ice and the [...]

Optics basics: Young’s double slit experiment at Skulls in the Stars

Iron: 7.87 g/cm^3 Mercury: 13.5 g/cm^3
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Welcome to Who Wants to be an Atomic Physicist?
Is It a Gas, Fluid, Solid, or All of the Above?
Because rubidium is magnetic, however, Stamper-Kurn and his Berkeley colleagues thought that the magnetic interactions between rubidium atoms in the gas might nudge them to adopt a type of regular spacing like atoms in a solid.
To look [...]

Electrons in Rydberg states exhibiting behavior like classical orbits — Lagrange L points.
Rumour spreadin a-round in that Texas town
’bout that shack outside Lagrange
An astronomical solution to an old quantum problem
When a small satellite moves in a sun-earth system there are five stable points at which the satellite remains fixed with respect to the rotating [...]

Blowing (Up) Hydrogen Bubbles
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