What's Nu, Pussycat?

Starts With a Bang: The New Nu News!

[B]ack in the late 90’s, an experiment called LSND — Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector — sought to measure neutrino oscillations from antineutrinos emitted from a radioactive source. And they did measure it! And — for about 10 years — everyone thought there was something wrong with their data.

Why? Because it both looks and sounds crazy.

Dish Soap Mechanics

I saw this picture tweeted by drskyskull, and I must point out that the “powerballs” are indeed, quanta in this paradigm. Not every use of the word implies that quantum mechanics is involved or being invoked.

Quantum means “discrete.” A liquid would represent a continuum.

Trees Come Out of the Air

Fun to Imagine 1: Jiggling Atoms

Richard Feynman, one of America’s most renowned physicists, sits down in an armchair at his Californian home to explain the physics that underpins the world around us. In this first episode, he explores the beauty of the way atoms interact with each other and reveals why fires feel hot.

edit: Link doesn’t work (anymore) outside of the US.

So, here:

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

Popping the Kids' Balloons

Minister for Home Affairs: I’d like to answer this question if I may in two ways. Firstly in my normal voice and then in a kind of silly high-pitched whine

Cocktail Party Physics: helium: a weighty question

One-fifth of the world’s helium supply is used in MRIs. The typical MRI requires superconducting magnets and, since we haven’t figured out room-temperature superconductivity yet, they require liquid nitrogen or liquid helium to keep them in the superconducting state. Most systems use a closed cycle – helium cools the magnet, warms up in the process, turns to a gas, and is re-liquefied. A typical MRI magnet, however, requires 1700-2000 liters of liquid helium. Older models have to be refilled on a timescale from months to years, while newer models advertise that they “never” need to be refilled. (I’m about to buy a system like that. We’ll see how long ‘never’ is.) MRI resolution gets better the larger the magnetic field. Larger magnetic fields require larger magnets and thus more liquid helium.

What's Cooking in the Pizza Lab?

The Pizza Lab: Bringing Neapolitan Pizza Home (aka ‘The Skillet-Broiler Method’)

Real food science — bringing the physics along with the recipe.

It’s basic thermodynamics. Air at a given temperature has less energy than stone at a given temperature. Because of this, even if both my stone and the air in my oven are at 550 degrees, the part of the pizza in contact with the stone cooks much more rapidly than the top. By the time the bottom is crisp, the top has yet to take on any significant color.
The solution to this is quite simple, and happily makes for a much cooler kitchen as well: forget preheating the oven: just use the broiler. A broiler not only cooks via hot air like the oven, but more importantly, it adds a significant amount of radiant heat to the mix, cooking the top of the pizza directly with electro-magnetic waves—a much more efficient means of heat transfer.

A View of the Neighborhood

The Big Picture: Around the Solar System

With dozens of spacecraft currently orbiting, roving or otherwise and traveling through our solar system, I thought it would be interesting to get a general snapshot in time, using images from NASA and ESA spacecraft near Mercury, Earth, the Moon, Mars, Saturn and a few in-transit to further destinations. Collected here are recent images gathered from around our solar system, at scales ranging from mere centimeters to millions of kilometers.