A research study about lights, food, a rotating chair, and earmuffs is featured the “May We Recommend” column in the special Rotation and Spinning issue (volume 28, number 5) of the magazine. You can read that article free online. Better still, buy a copy of the issue (it’s in PDF form). Or better better still, subscribe […]
Things take a turn in this roundabout technical study of lasagna: “Multiphysics modeling of microwave heating of a frozen heterogeneous meal rotating on a turntable,” Krishnamoorthy Pitchai, Jiajia Chen, Sohan Birla, David Jones, Ric Gonzalez, and Jeyamkondan Subbiah, Journal of Food Science, vol. 80, no. 12, 2015, pp. E2803-E2814. (Thanks to Mason Porter for bringing […]
A round of surprise appears in a glass of beer—or a glass of coffee or tea—when you shake it stirringly. Details are in this study: “Counter-Rotation in an Orbitally Shaken Glass of Beer,” Frédéric Moisy, J. Bouvard, and Wietze Herreman [pictured below], EPL [Europhysics Letters], vol. 122, no. 3, no. 34002, 2018. The authors, at Université […]
If you’re not a professional typographic practitioner, you might fall into the trap of thinking that certain upper-case letters (such as H, I, N and O) will look exactly the same upside down (i.e. when rotated 180 degrees about their z* axis). But subtle complications can, and do arise when there are serifs involved. One […]
Theoretical and practical investigations have shown that the ‘Coriolis effect’ (see video above) can substantially influence physical systems such as the trajectory of cannon balls and the rotation of meteorological phenomena. But very little research has addressed the issue of whether it might also affect human behaviour. For example, might the Coriolis effect affect which […]
There are lots of top ten lists, but this is the first Ten Tops List. Here are ten videos of spinning tops that scientists find interesting and or amusing. [Want to take a whirl at learning the science of spinning tops? Download (free) Professor John Perry’s 1890 book Spinning Tops— The “Operatives’ lecture” of the British […]
We’ve seen that dog rotation can be pleasing (as in the instance we described recently) or not (as in the instance described even more recently). But what of rabbit rotation? Here’s one instance that, one can infer, was not terribly pleasing: “Changes in animal reactivity under the influence of prolonged rotation,” N.I. Arlashchenko and A.A. […]
Dog rotation can be pleasing (as in the instance we described recently). But sometimes it’s not — think about the rotation described in this study: “Gastric torsion in the dog—II. Nonsurgical treatment by aspiration of gastric contents during repeated rotation of the animal“, B. Funkquist and N. Obel, Journal of Small Animal Practice, Volume 20, […]
If you struggle to remember which direction is clockwise, and which is counterclockwise, here is another instructive example. Seen from your vantage point, the puppies in this video are rotating in the COUNTERCLOCKWISE direction: (Thanks to investigator Geri Sullivan for bringing this to our attention.)