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Tech NewsThese Animated Riffs on 1870s Galloping Horse Footage Are Delightful
Animation students at Carnegie Mellon University were recently tasked with reimagining classic film footage of a galloping horse from the late 19th century. They did not disappoint, drawing on Burger King, space aliens, rainbow centaurs, and modern art for inspiration. The footage in question was taken by British photography pioneer Eadweard Muybridge. He was asked … Continued
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Tech NewsGravitational Waves Explained to the Beat of ‘Can’t Feel My Face’ Sounds Awesome
Are you tired of hearing about how awesome it is that we’ve discovered gravitational waves? LIGO is so last month, right? Here’s something to make the topic seem fresh and wondrous again: a delightful a cappella parody music video, set to the tune of The Weeknd’s “Can’t Feel My Face,” by A Capella Science. A … Continued
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Tech NewsPhysicists Create ‘Pseudo-Particles’ for Error-Free Quantum Computing
We may be one step closer to quantum computing that’s inherently protected from errors. Physicists at the University of Copenhagen have successfully created an exotic type of pseudo-particle that is immune to outside interference. The results are described in a new paper in Nature. Unlike a classical computer, with bits representing 0’s and 1’s, a … Continued
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Tech NewsA Violin’s Warm, Mellow Sound Comes From Its Varnish
Violin makers routinely finish their instruments with a thick coat of varnish, the better to protect and preserve the wood. Now Swiss scientists claim that this varnish also plays a role in the overall sound quality of the instrument. As described in a new paper in Applied Physics A, Marjan Gilani and her colleagues at … Continued
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SciencePhysics & ChemistryThe Problem With Teleportation
Teleportation is a safe, convenient mode of travel in the Star Trek universe. But what if the Star Trek transporter is essentially a “suicide box” instead? That’s the unnerving conclusion of a new animated video from CGP Grey about the trouble with transporters. Think about it. All your atoms are scanned and destroyed in the … Continued
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Tech NewsScientists Are Still Arguing About That Chopra Bullshit Study
Remember last November when Canadian scientists published a study using the tweets of Deepak Chopra to demonstrate how some people can interpret utter bullshit as deeply profound observations? It’s now sparked a counter-argument and a sharp rejoinder—two respectable scientists arguing about the meaning (or lack thereof) of bullshit. The actual title of that 2015 paper … Continued
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ScienceBiologyWatch These Two Rattlesnakes Battle It Out in Elaborate ‘Combat Dance’
A Phoenix woman hiking along a trail stumbled across a couple of male rattlesnakes locked in an elaborately orchestrated “combat dance.” Frankly, it looks a lot like a mating ritual, especially when you consider that this behavior is usually only seen during breeding season. But apparently they really are fighting. “I noticed something across the … Continued
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Tech NewsUCLA Scientists Think Poo Could Power Our Cars
Forget hybrids, electric vehicles, or hydrogen cars. Scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, want your poo to fuel the cars of the future. The United States produces a mountain of manure (human and otherwise) every year: more than 1 billion tons. All that waste matter is being wasted in turn, according to UCLA … Continued
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Tech NewsGraphene Patterned After Moth Eyes Could Give Us ‘Smart Wallpaper’
Tweaking the structure of graphene so that it matches patterns found in the eyes of moths could one day give us “smart wallpaper,” among a host of other useful technologies. Using a novel technique called “nano texturing,” scientists at the University of Surrey in England have successfully modified ultra-thin graphene sheets to create the most … Continued
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Tech NewsYour Belly Button Lint Makes a Beautiful Portrait as Unique as Your Fingerprint
Your belly button is teeming with microbial life—a mix of many different species unique to you. Brooklyn-based artist Joana Ricou creates “portraits” based on individual microbiomes. The result is some surprisingly lovely imagery. Science has always informed Ricou’s art. Originally from Portugal, she studied art and biology at Carnegie Mellon University, spending equal time in … Continued
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SciencePhysics & Chemistry
Fermilab Physicists Have Discovered a Possible New Tetraquark
Fermilab’s Tevatron collider officially retired in 2011 after a long and glorious history of scientific discovery. But the data from its final run is still yielding potentially exciting results. Physicists from the DZero collaboration have announced the discovery of a new particle, believed to be part of an exotic family called “tetraquarks.” “At first we … Continued
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ScienceBiologyNew Video Series Explains Why Woodpeckers Are Built To Peck
Fans of woodpeckers and materials science will be thrilled to hear that MIT has just released a series of eight short-form videos explaining how woodpeckers can bang their heads against trees all day without suffering major brain trauma — or even getting so much as a headache. Called “Built To Peck: How Woodpeckers Avoid Brain … Continued
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SciencePhysics & ChemistryWe Could Soon Find Even More Gravitational Waves with Pulsar Arrays
It’s only been a couple of weeks since the world cheered for the LIGO collaboration that made the first direct detection of gravitational waves from a binary black hole merger. Now, another group hunting for these spacetime ripples say they could detect very low-frequency gravitational waves using existing radio telescopes in the next ten years … Continued
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SciencePhysics & ChemistryPhysics Holds the Secret to Blowing the Perfect Bubble
We’ve all delighted in the simple joy of blowing bubbles, but most of us never stop to think about the underlying physics. Now French physicists have devised a mathematical model that precisely predicts just how hard you need to blow to produce a perfectly formed bubble. Laurent Courbin and Pascal Panizza of the French National … Continued
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Tech NewsThis Scientist Is Turning Every Element In the Periodic Table Into Music
Materials scientists typically rely on their eyes to analyze data, but soon they could employ their ears as well. Setting the motions of molecules to music can help scientists identify hidden patterns in their data that might otherwise be too small, or occur over such short time scales that they’re easily missed by the human … Continued
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Tech NewsRosetta’s Comet Inspired These Paintings—And the Materials Used to Create Them
Millions of people around the globe were enthralled when the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft successfully landed on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in November 2014. Artist Ekaterina Smirnova was one of them—so much so that she has created an entire series of giant watercolor paintings inspired by the comet. “It is unbelievably hard to land a robotic … Continued
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Tech NewsSploidWatch What Happens When You Add Lithium to 7-Up
What happens if you add metallic lithium to a glass of 7-Up? First, it bubbles like Alka-Seltzer. Then, it starts to heat up and boil. As it does so, the color changes: to green, yellowish-brown, and reddish brown, until it is pretty much black sludge. “By the time I went to the lab, it looked … Continued
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SciencePhysics & Chemistry
Celebrate Gravitational Waves With This Spiral-Patterned Soup Bowl
Last week physicists finally succeeded in directly detecting gravitational waves, 100 years after Albert Einstein predicted them. Even before then, the phenomenon inspired modernist chef Nathan Myhrvold to design a unique soup bowl mimicking the pretty spiral patterns of these elusive ripples in the fabric of spacetime. Perhaps best known as the former chief technology … Continued
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Tech NewsSploidA Spinning Top Floating Inside a Smoke-Filled Bubble Looks Like Magic
Bubbles, magnetic levitation, and gyroscopes — there’s tons of super-cool DIY physics at work in the Levitron. Created by Dustin Skye, it’s a spinning top floating in mid-air inside a smoke-filled bubble, all for your viewing pleasure. To create the levitating top, Skye placed a large ring-shaped magnet in a wooden base filled with bubble-making … Continued
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SciencePhysics & Chemistry
Now We Know How Many Ways We Can Arrange 128 Tennis Balls
Here’s a question worthy of the ball boy at Wimbledon: if you have 128 tennis balls packed into a container, how many different ways can you arrange them? Answer: 10250 — more than the entire number of subatomic particles in the universe. That’s the conclusion of a team of researchers at the University of Cambridge … Continued
Jennifer Ouellette
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