Applied Physics

Why Anchors Don't Work

Why Anchors Don't Work From earliest times to today, from boat safety pamphlet to engineering treatise on marine architecture: all are agreed that the anchor does the work of keeping a boat or ship from moving. It doesn't.  It can't. Machin ...

Article - Patrick Lockerby - Mar 2 2010 - 5:36pm

How Is Inkjet Printing Done?

Inkjet Printing Technique ...

Article - Mei Fang - Jul 1 2010 - 5:06am

The Science Of Caber Tossing

I went to the Scottish Games in Woodland, California last weekend, two young boys in tow.  They weren't remotely interested in Scottish women doing traditional dances and they were vaguely intrigued by why men wore kilts. "Papa, why is that man w ...

Article - Hank Campbell - Apr 27 2019 - 10:22am

Robots And Newton- How Science Will Clean Up The Gulf Oil Spill

If you hadn't noticed before today, the impact of the Gulf Oil spill may have been understated.  Sure, sure, I know what you are thinking; in the Internet-plus-24-hour-news-Age everything is overstated but just this once the mass hysteria apparently d ...

Article - Hank Campbell - May 14 2010 - 1:34pm

What Makes Freak Waves Stable? Modelling Non-Linear Giant Waves

Giant freak waves- seriously, that is what oceanographers and physicists call them- are called that because they can appear on the open sea out of nowhere. Researchers from the Ruhr- Universität Bochum and the University of Umeå, Sweden say they have devel ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 19 2010 - 10:26am

Origami Transformers? Programmable Matter May Be More Than Meets The Eye

Researchers at Harvard and MIT using what is called programmable matter have demonstrated how a single thin sheet composed of interconnected triangular sections could transform itself into a boat- or plane-shape, all without the help of people. They envisi ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 28 2010 - 5:02pm

The Physics Of The Vuvuzela

If you've watched any World Cup games so far (and a record 15 million in the US watched Saturday's match versus Ghana, so statistically, ummm, 50,000 people in our audience have watched at least one) you may have heard an omnipresent buzzing soun ...

Article - Hank Campbell - Feb 12 2012 - 10:45pm

Science Of Soccer Balls- Houston, We Have A Drag Crisis

It's World Cup time and that means sports fans worldwide are focused on important issues, like complaining about vuvuzelas and this year's soccer ball, the Jabulani, which will push fan and player hatred of the 2006 ball, Teamgeist, into the back ...

Article - Hank Campbell - Jul 1 2010 - 4:41pm

Creating 300 Tesla... Without Applying A Magnetic Field?

Researchers have reported the creation of pseudo-magnetic fields far stronger than the strongest magnetic fields ever sustained in a laboratory, just by putting the right kind of strain onto a patch of graphene. Graphene is a form of carbon that consists o ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 12 2010 - 5:50pm

Introducing The World's Smallest Mirror

Traditional mirrors work by directing the path of photons of light but atoms possessing a magnetic moment can likewise be controlled using a magnetic mirror.  A new study investigates the feasibility of using magnetic domain walls to direct and ultimately ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 10 2010 - 10:41am