Applied Physics

Parting The Red Sea- Could It Have Happened? Wind Setdown Model Says Yes

Since you are not Moses, with an omnipotently powerful deity covering your escape, in the situation of a fanatical pharaoh on your trail you may be confused as to how you could part the Red Sea and thus save your People.   Numerical modeling is here to hel ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 22 2010 - 11:17am

Thermo-Electricity: Future Computers Could Run On Their Own Heat Rather Than Electricity

A semiconductor material called gallium manganese arsenide has been shown to have an interesting new effect that converts heat into a quantum mechanical phenomenon – known as spin – in a semiconductor.   If developed, the effect could enable integrated cir ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 27 2010 - 7:44pm

Science Or Myth? Breaking Curveballs In Baseball

Baseball players will tell you that a fastball can rise- and elementary physics says it can also, the same way an airplane rises because the teardrop shape of a wing causes air to go over the top faster than below the flatter bottom, 'sucking' it ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 24 2014 - 8:42pm

Meta-Flex: Your Future Invisibility Cloak?

Depending on whether or not an invisibility cloak conjures up images of 'Harry Potter' or "Star Trek", we can tell a lot about you your age but as far back as H.G. Wells' turn-of-the-19th-century classic "The Invisible Man&quo ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 4 2010 - 1:38pm

Rigid Membranes And How Folded Structures Form

Our brain, wrinkles on our faces and even mountain chains have one thing in common- all those things, though very different, result from the same process, namely the compression of a 'rigid membrane'.  Take a thin sheet of a solid material and tr ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 7 2010 - 12:11am

Foucault For The 21st Century

When we discuss Foucault on a science site, we mean French physicist Léon Foucault and not that annoying prat of a post-modernist, Michel Foucault.    You know who  Léon Foucault  is if you have been to a science museum in the last 150 years because you sa ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 9 2010 - 1:05pm

Cavitation Damage- Getting Bubbles Out Of Jet Fuel Pumps

Under certain conditions vapor bubbles can form in fluids moving swiftly over a surface and those bubbles soon collapse with such great force that they can even poke holes in steel and damage objects such as ship propellers and fuel pumps.    ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 16 2010 - 11:23am

Take Us To The Gates Of Chaos!

A team of researchers has created an alternative to conventional logic gates, demonstrated them in silicon, and dubbed them "chaogates."  They used 'chaotic' patterns to encode and manipulate inputs to produce a desired output, in that ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 17 2010 - 11:20am

Weiss Domains Shown For First Time In 3-D

Every magnetic material is divided into magnetic domains, called "Weiss domains" after physicist Pierre-Ernest Weiss, who predicted their existence theoretically more than a hundred years ago. In 1907, he recognized that the magnetic moments of a ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 23 2010 - 12:18pm

A Predictive Model For Coffee Ring Stains

We don't know about yours but this holiday season, the homes of most scientists will be awash with even more coffee than usual. And that means coffee ring stains. With the volume of science done in coffee houses (like Newton, who ate his meals in one ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 24 2010 - 11:13am