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 […]
Tag: Physics
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, […]