Applied Physics

Jewelry Box Electronics Survival Kit, The Diode, And Wireworld

It seems nowadays that makers (1) like to carry spare electronic parts around in a mint tin. Maybe I’m just Macgyver-old-school and prefer the challenge of getting along with just duct tape and a Leatherman Juice (OK, it is indeed an upgrade from Angus ...

Article - Steve Schuler - Oct 15 2013 - 1:13pm

Less Turbulence: Plasma Actuators Could Mean Quieter Cars And Aircraft

Plasmas are a soup of charged particles in an electric field. While most commonly a part of lightning bolts and stars, the use of high voltage equipment has more practically meant very small plasmas can be used to manipulate fluid flows. Plasma actuators ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 19 2013 - 8:46pm

Chaos Researchers Say They Can Predict Market Bubbles

Some of the more recent dramatic disasters in world-wide markets have occurred, not because people panicked or an election did not go someone's way, but because financial institutions have taken to hiring physicists who wrote papers on predicting cha ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 20 2013 - 10:31am

Active Camouflage: Thermal Chameleon Coating Created

Active camouflage update. In a Harvard School of Engineering laboratory test, a team of applied physicists placed a device  with a new coating that intrinsically conceals its own temperature to thermal cameras on a hot plate and watched it through an infr ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 21 2013 - 5:14pm

Acoustic Diode Will Take Ultrasound Into The 21st Century

Many people know about ultrasound because of its popularity in prenatal imaging- grainy, grey outlines of babies made using reflected sound waves. A new 'acoustic diode' could dramatically improve future ultrasound images by changing the way tho ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 4 2013 - 5:36pm

Urine Science: What Peeing Elephants Teach About Fluid Dynamics

Anyone who has watched water exit a toilet bowl has learned something about fluid dynamics. But you can learn a thing or two by watching the pee that goes into it also. Boring physicists apply the equations of fluid motion to boring thing like a flag in t ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 7 2013 - 6:20pm

Exoskeleton For The Elderly

Patients may soon be able to get a bionic pick-me-up without undergoing the pain and lengthy recovery of surgery- an exoskeleton to support people who, through age or injury, are limited in their movement. ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 12 2013 - 1:32pm

39 Minutes: Quantum Superposition World Record Smashed

A normally fragile quantum state has been shown to survive at room temperature for a world record 39 minutes, overcoming a key barrier towards building ultrafast quantum computers. In conventional computers data is stored as a string of 1s and 0s. In the ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 17 2013 - 8:00am

Weekend Science: How Does A Teakettle Whistle Work?

Whistling kettles have been around for over a hundred years but science behind the mechanism of this siren sound, portent of delicious tea and cocoa (and heretical instant coffee) has never been fully described scientifically. Ask an engineer or a physici ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 15 2013 - 1:07pm

Weekend Science: The Physics Of Beer Tapping

If you have ever wondered about why you can tap a newly opened beer bottle and its suds will foam out and go all over the place, researchers from Carlos III University and Universite Pierre et Marie Curie, Institut Jean le Rond d'Alembert have provid ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 3 2015 - 5:43pm