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How Many Homes Could You Power With Free Doughnuts?
Dot PhysicsScienceScience / Physics and Math April 13, 2021 0
Should you get a Covid-19 vaccine? Yes, it will protect you and others to help us move past this pandemic and get back to a more normal life. But wait! If you get vaccinated, you can also get a doughnut! At least, that’s the deal that Krispy Kreme is... Read more
How Strong Is King Kong? And Could He Even Stand Up?
Dot PhysicsScienceScience / Physics and Math April 7, 2021 0
It’s time for Godzilla vs. Kong—a classic battle between two impossibly giant creatures. I’ve only seen the trailer, and it looks like a fun movie. But movies aren’t just for fun, they are also for physics. In particular, this is a great chance to consider the physics of scale—what... Read more
Ancient Rocks Reveal When Earth’s Plate Tectonics Began
Let's RockScienceScience / Physics and Math March 29, 2021 0
Tusch and Münker developed a powerful new method for extracting tiny traces of tungsten from ancient rocks. Then they went looking for the rocks. First they analyzed Archean rocks collected in the Isua region in western Greenland. Tusch spent 11 months analyzing the samples, but in the end his... Read more
The Physics of That Spinning Hug in Dua Lipa’s Music Video
Dot PhysicsScienceScience / Physics and Math March 28, 2021 0
Great, now let’s use these same ideas to show why you can’t hug someone while leaning super far back (unless you are on an awesome rotating platform). Actually, just to make things easier I am going to draw the forces on a single human that is just doing a... Read more
Quantum Mischief Rewrites the Laws of Cause and Effect
Post-Causal PhysicsScienceScience / Physics and Math March 22, 2021 0
Alice and Bob, the stars of so many thought experiments, are cooking dinner when mishaps ensue. Alice accidentally drops a plate; the sound startles Bob, who burns himself on the stove and cries out. In another version of events, Bob burns himself and cries out, causing Alice to drop... Read more
Illustration: Rhett Allain Notice that there is a nice linear relationship between the angular position of the wheel and the horizontal position? The slope of this line is 0.006 meters per degree. If you had a wheel with a bigger radius, it would move a greater distance for each... Read more
How Far Away From Perseverance Did the Descent Stage Land?
Dot PhysicsScienceScience / Physics and Math March 3, 2021 0
Dare Mighty Things. That was the hidden message in the parachute of the Mars Perseverance rover. It’s not quite as mighty, but I am going to dare something myself: I’m going to try to figure out how far the descent stage would land from the rover. OK, let me... Read more
Sleuths Read Old Booby-Trapped Letters Without Opening Them
Between the LinesScienceScience / Physics and Math March 2, 2021 0
On July 31, 1697, Jacques Sennacques sent a letter to his cousin—one Pierre Le Pers, a French merchant living in the Hague—begging him, for the love of Pete (that’s paraphrased), to send him a death certificate for his relative, Daniel Le Pers. In a 17th century version of the... Read more
A Decades-Long Quest Reveals New Details of Antimatter
ScienceScience / Physics and MathThe Proton Sea February 28, 2021 0
It often goes unmentioned that protons, the positively charged matter particles at the center of atoms, are part antimatter. We learn in school that a proton is a bundle of three elementary particles called quarks—two “up” quarks and a “down” quark, whose electric charges (+2/3 and −1/3, respectively) combine... Read more
The Brain’s ‘Background Noise’ May Be Meaningful After All
ScienceScience / Physics and MathSignals in Static February 22, 2021 0
At a sleep research symposium in January 2020, Janna Lendner presented findings that hint at a way to look at people’s brain activity for signs of the boundary between wakefulness and unconsciousness. For patients who are comatose or under anesthesia, it can be all-important that physicians make that distinction... Read more