Enlarge / Georgia Tech’s Alexandre Locquet (left) and David Citrin (right) with an image of the 16th-century funerary cross used in their study. (credit: Georgia Tech-Lorraine) In 1843, archaeologists excavated the burial grounds associated with Remiremont Abbey in Lorraine, France (the abbey was founded in the 7th century). It was medieval custom to bury the […]
If you have to test the mechanics of an Oreo, what better fixture is there than an oreometer? Everyone has their preferred method for snacking on tasty Oreo cookies: twisting the two halves apart to eat the creme filling first, perhaps, before dunking the chocolate wafers in a glass of milk. But you may have […]
Enlarge / Scientists have devised a new method for determining the aerodynamics of baseballs in free flight. (credit: Mike Kemp/Getty Images) Baseball has long been a popular topic of research for physicists, largely because of the complex aerodynamics of a baseball in flight. Traditionally, scientists relied upon wind tunnel experiments to measure key properties like […]
Enlarge / Illustration of a candidate event for a W boson decaying into one muon and one neutrino from proton-proton collisions, recorded by the Large Hadron Collider’s ATLAS detector in 2018. (credit: ATLAS Collaboration/CERN) The Standard Model of Particle Physics has withstood rigorous test after test over many decades, and the discovery of the Higgs […]
Enlarge / Image from a 2018 observational study of ballooning in large spiders depicting a crab spider just as it is about to take off. (credit: Cho, M. et al., 2018/CC BY-SA 4.0) In 1832, Charles Darwin witnessed hundreds of ballooning spiders landing on the HMS Beagle while some 60 miles offshore. Ballooning is a […]
Enlarge / A rendering of the star V Hydrae, or V Hya for short. In its death throes, the star emitted a series of expanding rings that scientists calculated are being formed every few hundred years, per UCLA astronomer Mark Morris. (credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/S. Dagnello (NRAO/AUI/NSF)) Astronomers have caught a red giant star going through […]
Enlarge / NIST researchers collaborated with the National Gallery of Art and other organizations to study “metal soaps” found in oil paintings. The soaps can cause the painting to degrade over time. (credit: National Gallery of Art/A. Centrone/NIST) Scientists at the National Institute of Standards of Technology collaborated with the National Gallery of Art and […]
Enlarge / Ryan North, creator of Dinosaur Comics, offers a step-by-step guide to becoming the next Lex Luthor in his new book, How To Take Over the World: Practical Schemes and Scientific Solutions for the Aspiring Supervillain. (credit: Ryan North, tweaked by Aurich Lawson) Are you a fan of superhero comics who identifies more with […]
Enlarge / The hardware that slows down antiprotons so they can be used in these sorts of experiments. (credit: CERN ) In Wednesday’s issue of Nature, a new paper describes a potentially useful way associated with measuring the interactions between normal matter and exotic particles, like anti-protons and unstable items such as kaons or elements […]
Enlarge / Physicists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have demonstrated that using a ruler—rather than the time-honored method of throwing a spaghetti strand against the wall—may be the best way to confirm when pasta is fully cooked. (credit: Nopadol Uengbunchoo/Getty Images) Scientists found themselves working from home along with most everyone else when universities […]