Category Archives: Physics
Doing a NUMB3R on Non-Newtonian Fluids
On NUMB3RS the other night, Charlie and Larry run over a pool of a non-Newtonian fluid, comprised of cornstarch and water. (Larry sinks in the teaser segment, but is successful at the closing). Non-Newtonian fluids are those that have a viscosity that changes when you apply a force. In this case it is shear-thickening, so it behaves much like a solid when pressure is quickly applied.
Here’s a video of a quite similar scene
The Physics of Chocolate
The Physics of Chocolate over at Cosmic Variance.
Top Ten Redux
The Top ten greatest experiments, with brief descriptions. More detail that the book review to which I previously linked.
Rube-y Goldberg Tuesday II
He Ain't Heavy
… he’s my unbibium.
Reports of a naturally occurring superheavy element
Non peer-reviewed reports, mind you, this is on arXiv
In the neighborhood of Z = 122, A = 292, abundance = 10^-12, relative to thorium, and a half-life in excess of 100 million years. Found when doing mass-spectrometry on Thorium. The half-life appears to be inferred from the relative abundance. If it’s real.
Infrared You Won't Forget
Notice that the ears are cooler — an elephant uses its ears for thermoregulation. The same idea as fins on any heat sink: lots of surface area. That’s necessary because of the elephant’s shape (the spherical approximation is much more reasonable for an elephant than for a cow) meaning has a small surface-to-volume ratio, so it’s efficient at retaining heat.
With a wide surface area of outer ear tissue, hot blood in the arteries is cooled as it is filtered through the vast network of capillaries and veins. Thus, the body temperature is regulated with the cooled blood returning to the main body.
The Strange-ness Attractor
Female Science Professor makes an observation about random scientific inquiries made to universities
In some cases, the questions are easy and quick to answer — for example, some people call with a question about something they heard on the news. In some cases, people stop by the department (with or without calling first) and expect assistance. At least 62%* of these people are very strange. On several occasions, I have had random people call me and tell me what I should study in my research. Apparently I have been studying the wrong things. I have not yet, however, been tempted by any of these new and creative ideas, 100% of which have been bizarre.
[…]
Do some departments attract more wackos than others, or do all/most academic departments have their own special kind? Someone should study this
I know that in grad school, we had a folder of crank inquiries kept in the department’s main office, and one of my fellow students was once tasked to inspect some gizmo a random person had brought in to show one of the professors (I suspect at that point it’s better to do this than simply send the person away) because he was convinced it was an over-unity device. It wasn’t, BTW. In physics, most of the crackpots fall into three main categories: perpetual motion, anti-relativity, and anti-quantum mechanics. There are other meta-crackpots that just rail against the whole process of doing physics, claiming it’s flawed.
Astronomic Spring Break: Show Me Your Globular Clusters!
Space pics: ‘Galaxies gone wild’
(Why should the particle physicists have all the fun, experimenting with massive bosons?)
Spineless Particles and Vicious Forces
A post over at The Quantum Pontiff reminded me of these mildly dyslexic terms in the title, one of which gets corrected at Google.
(I wonder, do dyslexics read “dyslexia” as “daily sex,” as in “I suffer from daily sex?”)