New research from Ig Nobel (and Nobel) Prize winner Andre Geim: Jennifer Ouellette reports, in Ars Technica:
Physicists solve 150-year-old mystery of equation governing sandcastle physics
“This came as a big surprise. I expected a complete breakdown of conventional physics.”Building sandcastles at the beach is a time-honored tradition around the world, elevated into an art form in recent years thanks to hundreds of annual competitions. While the basic underlying physics is well-known, physicists have continued to gain new insights into this fascinating granular material over the last decade or so. The latest breakthrough comes from Nobel Laureate Andre Geim’s laboratory at the University of Manchester in England, where Geim and his colleagues have solved a mathematical puzzle—the “Kelvin equation”—dating back 150 years, according to a new paper just published in Nature….
Earlier, Prize-winning Works
The 2000 Ig Nobel Physics Prize was awarded to Andre Geim and Michael Berry, for using magnets to levitate a frog. [REFERENCE: “Of Flying Frogs and Levitrons” by M.V. Berry and A.K. Geim, European Journal of Physics, v. 18, 1997, p. 307-13.]
Ten years after that, Andre Geim and his student Konstantin Novoselov were awarded a Nobel Physics Prize for their discovery, using sticky tape and a pencil, of bits of, and bits of understanding of, graphene, a two-dimensional form of carbon.