When a person walks while carrying a full cup (with no lid) of coffee, it is almost inevitable that some coffee will spill. Two Ig Nobel Prizes have honored research that analyzed why. Small Expedition Room produced this video news report [in Korean] about the phenomenon: Those Two Coffee-Spill Ig Nobel Prizes The 2012 Ig […]
Tag: Physics
Richard Feynman talking about trying to figure out things
Richard Feynman:
How to Spill a Cup of Coffee
“How to Spill a Cup of Coffee” is a featured article in the special Coffee, and Tea issue (volume 26, number 4) of the Annals of Improbable Research. It looks at two studies—each of which led to an Ig Nobel Prize—about the physics of how and why anyone who walks with a full cup of […]
The physics of tossing fried rice
David Hu, who has two Ig Nobel physics prizes (the first for discovering nearly-universal urination duration in mammals, the second for studying why wombat poo is cubic-shaped) has a new study out with colleague Hungtang Ko, about the physics of tossing fried rice. The study is “The physics of tossing fried rice,” Hungtang Ko and […]
The Shoelace Catastrophe, examined today at Cornell
Cornell University is hosting a talk today about the how-do-shoelaces-come-untied problem— specifically about the math and physics of it: MAE Colloquium: “The Shoelace Catastrophe (or a Knotty Problem on a Shoestring“) Tuesday, September 3, 2019 at 4:00pm, B11 Kimball Hall ABSTRACT: The accidental untying of a shoelace while walking often occurs without warning. Modeling and […]
Wrinkled sheets, crumpled paper
New research about how paper crumples was done in the same chunk of Harvard that produced an Ig Nobel Prize-winning study about how sheets get wrinkled. It builds on—and adds new wrinkles to—that earlier research. Siobhan Roberts reports, in the New York Times, about the paper-crumpling study: This Is the Way the Paper Crumples In a […]
Cleaning with spit, and now with pillars and pancakes
Last month human saliva got its due, with the awarding of the 2018 Ig Nobel Prize for chemistry, as an effective agent to clean surfaces. This month, pillars and pancakes are served up as an effective way to pattern surfaces so that those surfaces will be self-cleaning. Pillar/pancake details are in the new study “Pillars […]
New, tail-swinging research from the urination-duration lab
Ig Nobel Prize winner David Hu and colleagues published a new study investigating why elephants and other tail-swinging mammals swing their tails. Specifically, they looked at how (and how well) tail-swinging repels insects. The new study is: “Mammals Repel Mosquitoes With Their Tails,” Marguerite E. Matherne, Kasey Cockerill, Yiyang Zhou, Mihir Bellamkonda, David L. Hu, Journal […]
Inertial Properties of the German Shepherd Dog [research study]
Dogs and physics both figure heavy in the figuring in this new study of the inertial properties of German shepherd dogs: “Inertial Properties of the German Shepherd Dog,” O. Yvette Jones, Silvia U. Raschke, and Philip E. Riches, PLoS One, vol. 13, no. 10, 2018, e0206037. The authors, at the British Columbia Institute of Technology, […]
Physics Breakthough: Snapping a Spaghetti Strand Into 2 (Not 3!) Pieces
BREAKING NEWS! WITH A SURPRISING TWIST! Spaghetti—dry spaghetti—again feeds the intellectual fervor of physicists. Five physicists serve up a surprising new study about an old question about bending a strand past its breaking point: “Controlling Fracture Cascades Through Twisting and Quenching,” Ronald H. Heisser, Vishal P. Patil, Norbert Stoop, Emmanuel Villermaux, and Jörn Dunkel, Proceedings […]