Article 43KQV Physics Week in Review: November 24, 2018

Physics Week in Review: November 24, 2018

by
JenLucPiquant
from on (#43KQV)

6a00d8341c9c1053ef022ad3a25873200d-800wiHappy belated Thanksgiving! Since you're all likely still recovering from the culinary excesses of the holiday, here's some nifty physics links to peruse at your leisure. Among this week's highlights: how microfluidic devices could help Ant-Man and the Wasp breathe when they're bug-sized; a "strange metal" state in exotic superconductors; and NASA's Insight Mars lander is gearing up for its "seven minutes of terror" on Monday.

Me at Ars Technica:

Size Matters: Shrinking from human to ant size would increase metabolic rate and oxygen needs. Here's how insect-inspired microfluidic devices could help Ant-Man and the Wasp breathe.

Swarms of Cyclists: What we can learn about crowd behavior by watching the Tour de France. The group motion is similar to fluid circulation, marked by two types of waves.

More Than Just the Magnus Effect: Physics can explain the fastball's unexpected twist, per new study. Pitches vary as a result of different spin speed, spin axis, ball orientation.

Bot by Bot: It only takes a few seconds for bots to spread misinformation, new study finds. Just six percent of bots on Twitter accounted for 31 percent of bad information. [Image: Filippo Menczer]

6a00d8341c9c1053ef022ad3a25876200d-320wiNew TV spot for Glass will make you want to believe in super powers. Samuel Jackson's criminal mastermind wants the world to see super powers are real in the final installment of M. Night Shyamalan's "Eastrail 177" trilogy.

You'll Believe a Man Can... Swim? Hang on to your magical tridents, the final Aquaman trailer is here. But if you're skeptical about the film, there's not much here to change your mind.

Everything Is Still Pretty Awesome: It's a fight against bubblegum pastels in trailer for The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part. Emmet, Lucy, and Batman are back to save their world from terminal cuteness.

Circle of Life: Surprise! Disney drops first trailer for CGI-heavy live-action" remake of The Lion King. The trailer unexpectedly aired during the Cowboys/Redskins football game.

Bonus: MIT Press just published a terrific (if I say so myself) new anthology, Alice and Bob Meet the Wall of Fire, featuring some of the best writing from Quanta. And yes, yours truly has a couple of stories in it, including the title article. And Sean Carroll wrote the foreword. The other talented contributors arePhilip Ball, K. C. Cole, Robbert Dijkgraaf, Dan Falk, Courtney Humphries, Ferris Jabr, Katia Moskvitch, George Musser, Michael Nielsen, John Pavlus, Emily Singer, Andreas von Bubnoff, Frank Wilczek, Natalie Wolchover, and Carl Zimmer.

Other Cool Links:

This year Sean Carroll (aka The Time Lord, and my beloved spouse) gives thanks for the moons of Jupiter, inthe 13th installment of his annual Thanksgiving tradition.

How a ghostly, forgotten particle could be the saviour of physics. It was theorised decades ago but never seen. Now it seems the sterile neutrino could fix flaws in fundamental physics - if only we could find it.

Universal Quantum Phenomenon Found in Strange Metals. Experiments suggest that exotic superconducting materials share a strange metal" state characterized by a quantum speed limit that somehow acts as a fundamental organizing principle.

Cosmology Is in Crisis Over How to Measure the Universe. A raging debate over the Hubble constant suggests that our standard model of cosmology might be wrong.

Quantum Computing: Atomic Clocks Make for Longer-Lasting Qubits. How cesium atoms and lasers traps offer a more robust type of quantum computer.

Scientists unravel secret of cube-shaped wombat faeces. Patricia Yang and her Georgia Tech colleagues studied the digestive tracts of common wombats that had been euthanized after being struck by cars and trucks on roads in Tasmania.

Graphene generators could let you recharge a phone with your breath.

NASA is braced for seven minutes of terror' as its Insight probe is about to land on Mars. Related: NASA's InSight Is Built for Absurd Conditions. The latest robot to visit the red planet is built to withstand dust storms and temperatures that can melt steel during entry, descent, and landing.

How to Deconstruct a Football Tackle With Physics. Using video of a football collision, you can figure out the velocity and momentum of the players involved.

Can the Flash Touch a Lightsaber? "If you had true, problem-free super speed, the limits on the possible race away."

Physicists Used Einstein's Relativity To Successfully Predict A Supernova Explosion. Over 9 billion years ago, a distant star exploded. Thanks to Einstein, we've seen it multiple times on replay.

Can gravitational waves go through extra dimensions? Einstein says no.

This Is How Humanity's First Nuclear Explosion at the Trinity Site Created A New, Radioactive Mineral (Trinitite).

Ancient Egypt Discovered Variable Stars A Thousand Years Before European Astronomers.

What Einstein meant by God does not play dice': Einstein was responding to a letter from the German physicist Max Born.

"The water cycle is quite a bit more complicated than what we learn in elementary school, and the environment around us contributes to that cycle in invisible but vital ways."

Forget big rovers-one company envisions a swarm of tiny lunar prospectors.

The Uneasy Alliance Between Astrophysics and Warfare: Many significant advances in our understanding of the cosmos are by-products of government investment in the apparatus of warfare, and many innovative instruments of destruction are by-products of advances in astrophysics."

NASA astronomer Michelle Thaller on the multiple dimensions of space and human sexuality.

An Animated Introduction to the Forgotten Pioneer in Quantum Theory, Grete Hermann.

A New Virtual Reality Experience Takes You Inside A Black Hole. "Scientists at Radboud University in the Netherlands and Goethe University in Germany have used computer models of Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the heart of the Milky Way. Using a series of detailed images from themodels, the team developed a 360-degree VR simulation of Sagittarius A*. This resulting simulation can be viewed with any VR device."

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