What are the acoustics of breaking a bamboo chopstick? According to a new paper by physicist Tzay-Ming Hong and his colleagues at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, it’s kind of like the acoustics of breaking a bundle spaghetti: they both apparently resemble the Gutenberg–Richter scaling law, which relates earthquake magnitude to the frequency of earthquakes with at […]
Tag: Acoustics
Testing the Green-Cheese Theory of the Moon
Edward Schreiber and Orson Anderson once tested whether the Moon really could be made of green cheese. Caltech planetary scientist David Stephenson discussed that achievement, in Box 1 of his article in Physics Today in November 2014. In their 1970 article in the journal Science, Schreiber and Anderson compared the speeds of sound waves in rocks that were […]
‘Why It’s So Hard to Understand Opera’
If you’ve ever asked yourself why it’s so hard to understand opera, then you could turn to the work of Bertram M. Schwarzschild for explanation(s). He wrote an article on the subject which featured in the journal New Zealand Acoustics, 17(3), pp.15- 20 . (2004), entitled: ‘Why It’s So Hard to Understand Opera‘ “A frustrated […]
Trojan Butterflies
The name is alcon. Maculinea alcon. Like a suave British superspy, or maybe even a trojan horse or the proverbial cute abandoned baby left on a doorstep, some butterfly larvae mimic the chemicals of ants to get worker ants to bring them home to the nest. But that’s not all: as Francesca Barbero and Luca […]