There you are again, at the 11th hour, wrapping that present.
Off comes the price tag, ‘snip’ goes the scissors, and you peel off a piece of tape. Except that the tape, sensing your hurry, tapers down to a point and leaves with a useless, triangular piece. So you try again, once you find the point that was left on the tape roll. And once again, you find your piece of tape narrowing, narrowing, narrowing.
The same *!@#$ phenomenon happens with wallpaper, too. You can’t just peel it off in a nice, even swath; no, it has to peel away from the wall in those deterministically infuriating triangles.
Well, for what it's worth, it’s not you, it’s physics.
Now, an MIT mathematician and his international team of colleagues officially christen that effect "The Wallpaper Problem.” More importantly, in the March 30 issue of Nature Materials, they try to explainwhy, using a model of the peeling problem that accurately predicts the angle of the triangle.
The Big Bang, he says, is just one of many "bangs" in an infinite cycle of expansion and contraction between string-theoretical objects called "branes." Dark energy pulls two branes together and -- Ka-BLAMO -- they "separate and expand to form galaxies and stars."
In the film "Jumper," Hayden Christensen plays a superhero who can transport himself by wishing it so. The "I Dream of Jeannie"-like technique sounds a lot easier than Doc Brown's method of rigging up a time traveling DeLorean.
But how close is the film's teleporting to reality?
The New York Times reports on a recent panel of MIT physicists who broke down the science of teleporting. MIT's Edward Farhi said physicists have managed to teleport the quantum information of a photon for about one and a half miles, “a little less exotic than what you see in the movie.”
On Christmas Day, a tiger leapt from its enclosure before killing a 17-year-old visitor to the San Francisco Zoo. In a new paper posted on the arXiv, a couple of enterprising Boston-based investigators tackle the basic physics problem implied by the incident:
Can a tiger overcome an obstacle that is thirty-three feet away and twelve and a half feet tall?
It’s a classic two-dimensional projectile motion problem – could a tiger, running at its maximum speed and launching itself at the right angle, clear the fence surrounding the enclosure? (You’d think the problem might have been worked out a little sooner...) In the paper, the authors helpfully connect their equations to the real world, like in this quip:
We begin by first writing down the two-dimensional kinematical equations satisfied by
the projectile (tiger).
In 2006, invisibility cloaks took the world by storm, thanks to a joint effort by mathematicians, physicists and Harry Potter.
This year, however, the physicists have another surprise: you can be invisible AND silent!
Two independent teams of scientists came up the plans for a “cloak of silence,” a device which will be able to create a pocket of silence around an object by redirecting sound waves. Some physicists used to think such a device was mathematically impossible, but the two teams, one from Duke and the other from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, say their equations check out. (Image courtesy of Duke.)
The technology can be used by engineers to build better concert halls or hide submarines from sonar, but it’s unlikely that the scientists will come up with a cloak you can throw over your neighbor’s noisy dog. (And if a tree fell in the forest and everyone was wearing an acoustic cloak, would it make a noise?)
"Today, every few weeks brings news of a new Jupiter-sized extra-solar planet being discovered, the latest being about 15 light years away orbiting around the star Gliese 876. The most spectacular of these findings was photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope, which captured breathtaking photos of a planet 450 light years away being sling-shot into space by a double-star system.
"But the best is yet to come. Early in the next decade, scientists will launch a new kind of telescope, the interferometry space telescope, which uses the interference of light beams to enhance the resolving power of telescopes."
— Michio Kaku, Theoretical physicist and host of BBC series Visions of the Future.
In a brilliant essay, Michio Kaku observes that although conjecture about advanced civilizations a matter of sheer speculation, we can still use the laws of quantum field theory, general relativity, thermodynamics, to place upper and lower limits on these civilizations.
In addition to providing would-be igloo builders with a step-by-step guide to building an ice fortress, the excerpt explains how tension and compression act on the ice-bricks to keep the structure stranding; it even includes easy-to-interpret force diagrams. Other gems include: why the cross-sections of igloos are more like parabolas than semicircles, “gopher holes,” appropriate saws, and why you should cut a ramp in the snowblocks.
A few other fine points and thoughts on building an igloo:
I've been playing a lot of Super Mario Galaxy lately — it's sort of what happens when you're supposed to be "blogging" all day long. The gravity tricks employed by the game's engine are the best part; since you play on these tiny planetoids, you can often use gravity to maximize a jump, Jupiter-boost style, and you can even jump through holes in the center of certain planets and end up on the other side. Here's a quick example of some of the goofy fun:
The Republican showdown on YouTube wasn’t the only debate raging on Wednesday. In New York, scientists and scholars gathered at the National Academy of Design to weigh in on the art/science question that won’t go away: can you use fractal analysis to authenticate art?
The thing is, the reason so much easy credit (e.g. adjustable-rate mortgages) was available in the first place was that clever pure-math types on Wall Street -- they're called Quants, and they typically come from academic backgrounds, including mathematics and physics -- had figured out how to turn mortgage debt into financial instruments that could be sold to hedge funds, pension funds, and even individual investors.
The same mathematicians who last year introduced the world’s first “invisibility cloak” have a new show for 2007: Wormholes on Earth!
A “wormhole” is a short-cut in the fabric of space-time, a hypothetical tunnel that could carry you light-years away—or back in time. Or both. A time machine! A transporter! (You can picture a worm crawling along the surface of an apple, and suddenly realizing, hey! I can get to other side faster if I just dig a hole through the middle!)
Man, I've shredded plenty of sweet pow in my day, and all I ever came up with was a Unified Theory of Rad (it got rejected by the Institute for Advanced Study). But physicist-surfer-snowboarder-Burning-Man-attendee Garrett Lisi has constructed a compelling "theory of everything" based on analyzing an elegant, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern known as E8. Even Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics is smitten, describing Lisi's work as both "fabulous" and "one of the most compelling unification models I've seen in many, many years."
Everything I need to know in life I learned from video games. Among other pearls of wisdom, I learned that 1) all plumbers are Italian and will try to go down your toilet, 2) the alien menace is real and should be shot down with heavy firearms, and 3) no one can beat you in a fight until your health bar goes down. I'm still looking for an extra life in the shape of my head, though. That could come in handy.
Speaking of handy, Crayon Physics Deluxe by Kloonigames is a game for tablet PCs that might teach you a little something about physics. The object is to get the ball to the star by drawing whatever you want in the universe. Most simple objects correspond with basic laws of physics, it seems.
The world's first 28-qubit quantum computer was demonstrated this week at the Supercomputering 2007 Conference. Just a day earlier, Scientific American received a press release for Qubits™, an educational toy "giving a child the satisfaction of Building Strong Structures just like Mother Nature." Unfortunately for the computing wonks, each Qubits™ package comes with a whopping 60 Qubits™. Also, the company has trademarked "Qubits™." Looks like physicists everywhere need a new unit of measurement.
In the world of very, very, very small objects, there's a line. This line marks the threshold between comfort and discomfort, certainty and uncertainty, determinism and probability.
Physicists know about it; philosophers know about it. It's a size-line. Big things, like bowling balls and people and cells, are on one side of the line. This is the side that is governed by classical physics. Here, the laws of Newton and determinism and predictability reign supreme. You can throw a baseball and figure out where it's going. It's a comfortable side.
Physicists at the University of Missouri-Columbia are getting close to finishing a new kind of biological printer that, they say, will be able to “print” human tissue:
…the team used bio-ink particles, or spheres containing 10,000 to 40,000 cells, and assembled, or “printed,” them on to sheets of organic, cell friendly “bio-paper.”
The most striking part of the study, mentioned deep in the press release, answers the age old question: how do you produce a synthetic chicken heart that actually beats?
In the study, scientists took cells from a chicken heart and used them to form bio-ink particles, which were then printed on to thick sheets. Heart cells must be synchronized for the heart to beat properly. When the bio-ink particles were first printed, the cells did not beat in unison, but as the cellular spheroids fused, the structure eventually started beating just as a heart does.
What do you do with chicken hearts? How about this?
Halloween is here — I know because some midget dressed as Jack Sparrow just beat me up for a Butterfinger. Don't even try to tell me it was a 'child,' because that little bastard was stronger than a bull.
But what, might you ask, does a Celtic celebration of the spirit world and chocolate-covered razorblades have to do with science? EVERYTHING. In a recent issue of Skeptical Inquirer, two physicists tackled the myths surrounding vampires, zombies and ghosts to show how popular conceptions of these supernatural beings collide head-on with the laws of science. Now, I know there's no such thing as vampires because I killed the last one, but if you require more empirical evidence than my infallible word, Costas J. Efthimiou and Sohang Gandhi go on to debunk them and other classic Monster Mashers in a variety of cool ways.
Cambridge University physics prof Neil Turok 
On Christmas Day, a tiger leapt from its enclosure before killing a 17-year-old visitor to the San Francisco Zoo. In a new paper posted on the arXiv, a couple of enterprising Boston-based investigators 
The world's first 28-
In the world of very, very, very small objects, there's a line. This line marks the threshold between comfort and discomfort, certainty and uncertainty, determinism and probability. 
Halloween is here — I know because some midget dressed as Jack Sparrow just beat me up for a Butterfinger. Don't even try to tell me it was a 'child,' because that little bastard was stronger than a bull.
