Science-y effects and interesting takes on science demonstrations.
Taking it to the Next Level
If the Möbius bagel wasn’t enough, here’s an animation of how to cut a toroid into four linked pieces: Tetrabagelectomy
Update: Now there’s the octobagel
Sun Dog Beat Down
Atlas V launch earlier this month. The rocket goes supersonic as it passes through the cloud layer that was prettily refracting light from the sun (a sun dog), with the shock wave visible in the clouds and disrupting the effect. The fun starts at about 1:50, and is replayed a few times after that.
Making Quite an Impression
Lock picking with advanced foil impressioning
All you need to do now is put some turning pressure on the key and make small ‘up and down’ movements. The pins that are not in the correct position will bind and become stuck in the lock. These pins will push the tape in a little when the key is pushed upwards, and in the next round of ‘turning and rocking the key up and down’ these binding pins will keep pushing in the tape deeper and deeper until shear line is reached. The interesting thing is that once a pin reaches the ’shear line’ (opening position), it is no longer stuck and will not push in the tape deeper. The key will fit itself …
Feel the Burn, Baby
Pictured: Incredible gravity-defying ant that can carry 100 times its body weight
The photo shows an Asian weaver ant hanging upside down on a glass-like surface and holding a 500mg weight in its jaws. It was captured by Dr Thomas Endlein of Zoology department at the University of Cambridge who was investigating the sticky feet of ants and other insects.
No mention of results of any steroids testing on the ant.
Hair Care at the Olympics
Not that I need any help in that area.
I’ve been watching the curling televised in the afternoons this past week, and I have to apologize to the US teams — as soon as I tuned in, you tanked. Choked. Collapsed. Obviously, I’m bad luck and it’s all my fault. But I still enjoy watching; I was first exposed to the sport when I lived in Canada (though I knew people who curled when I was growing up; there was/is a curling rink right in the middle of Niskayuna)
Ran across this set of animations. The Physics of Curling
And obviously, you need to analyze the sweeping, too.
The claim is that the sweeping warms, but does not melt, the ice. However, there’s always some liquid on the surface, and temperature measurements don’t tell you everything, because pressure matters, too. But take all of that video with a grain of salt, because
Jenkyn’s full results are being kept secret until June 2010, revealed only to Canada’s Olympic athletes, coaches and officials.
“We’re sworn to secrecy,” he said.
It could all be a smokescreen to sabotage other teams. Maybe I’m off the hook.
Update: The men won last night. It’s not me.
Pharaoh's Snake — Very Dangerous. You Go First.
Mercury(II) thiocyanate decomposition is initiated by heating.
See the Music
Record grooves under an electron microscope
It has CD pips, too, for those of you too young to remember what a “record” is.
But if you put a needle in the groove and moved them relative to each other, the needle would wiggle back and forth. Use a transducer to convert it to an electrical signal, amplify it and send it to a speaker (which would essentially do the reverse). The groove is a composite of all the waveforms of the song, added together.
Mr. Smith Doesn't Go to Utah
13-year-old helps save daylight saving in Utah
I know this is supposed to be an uplifting story of how clever a teenager is, in a sort of afterschool special kinda way, but I’m more cynical than that. I see it as a bunch of blowhard politicians happily debating something they do not understand, have made no effort to understand, but are willing to make a decision about anyway, despite the fact that by not understanding the issue you have no hope of recognizing the ramifications of your decision. All this despite the fact that a teenager can understand and explain the concept, so it really wouldn’t have been all that difficult to have a staffer spend a few minutes Googling the information and summarizing it for you.
Einstein Passes, Again
Most precise test yet of Einstein’s gravitational redshift
When the cesium atom matter wave enters the experiment, it encounters a carefully tuned flash of laser light. The laws of quantum mechanics step in, and each cesium atom enters two alternate realities, Müller said. In one, the laser has pushed the atom up one-tenth of a millimeter – 4/1000 of an inch – giving it a tiny boost out of Earth’s gravitational field. In the other, the atom remains unmoved inside Earth’s gravitational well, where time flies by less quickly.
While the frequency of cesium matter waves is too high to measure, Müller and his colleagues used the interference between the cesium matter waves in the alternate realities to measure the resulting difference between their oscillations, and thus the redshift.
This is the UC Berkeley press release, and if one can ignore the use of the “many worlds” reference of alternate realities, is otherwise pretty good. It also includes some laser table porn which has been filtered out of the other stories I’ve run across. I’ve only had a chance to glance at the article, but there’s a lot of interesting physics in there that is not mentioned in the press release, or in the Nature summary story that ran in addition to the article (and was somewhat disappointing in terms of how it recapped the experiment).
The basic experiment is a decade old; the original idea was to measure the local value of g, because the two paths of the atoms have an energy difference of PE = mgh, and that gives you a phase difference for the two paths. The trick here is in reinterpreting the results in terms of relativity. I’ll try and summarize the details soon.