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 […]
Tag: Physics
A Black Hole in a Bathtub, More or Less [research study]
One can find dense, dark understanding in a bathtub, if one is a physicist. This new study provides an example: “Black Hole Quasibound States from a Draining Bathtub Vortex Flow,” Sam Patrick, Antonin Coutant, Maurício Richartz, and Silke Weinfurtner, Physical Review Letters, vol. 121, nos. 6-10, 2018, 061101. The authors, at the University of Nottingham, […]
Ig-Nobel-winning Peter Principle paper remains Physica A’s most popular
“That paper, published in Elsevier’s Physica A, remains the most popular of any paper in the journal on social media, according to the data analytics company Altmetric…. In September 2010, the paper also won the Ig Nobel Prize for Management, and after that it became increasingly popular.” So says the journal’s publisher, also saying: in […]
A physics discovery: Why Clothes Don’t Fall Apart
The UK-based team that shared an Ig Nobel Physics Prize in 2012 for exploring the physics of why ponytails (the hair style) are shaped like pony tails, has now looked into a different question from everyday life: Why clothes don’t fall apart. They published a study about it: “Why Clothes Don’t Fall Apart: Tension Transmission […]