The Acoustics of Breaking Chopsticks

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 […]

How To: Smartphone Assessment of Penile Deformity

Another example of  researchers bending new technology to meet their desires: “Validity and Reliability of a Smartphone Application for the Assessment of Penile Deformity in Peyronie’s Disease,” Ryan S. Hsi, James M. Hotaling, Andrea L. Hartzler, Sarah K. Holt, Thomas J. Walsh, Journal of Sexual Medicine, epub April 3, 2013. The authors, at the University […]

GeoCrypt

The best-named scientific conference of the year, so far, is the GeoCrypt conference: The GeoCrypt 2009 conference will take place at Hôtel Fleur d’Épée (Le Gosier), about 6km from Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, French West Indies [from April 27-May 1]… The purpose of the conference is to bring together researchers from arithmetic geometry and from cryptography and […]