Article 434YW Physics Week in Review: November 17, 2018

Physics Week in Review: November 17, 2018

by
JenLucPiquant
from on (#434YW)

6a00d8341c9c1053ef022ad3c07dd5200b-800wiWe were AWOL last week due to travel, but that means an extra helping of physics goodness this week. Among the highlights: remote controlled bacterial swarms, making atoms dance on a quantum donut, and cave acoustics to enhance artificial reverb.

Me at Ars Technica:

Dead Roach Walking: Cockroaches deliver karate kicks to avoid being turned into zombies." New ultra-slow-motion footage captures aggressive roach defense mechanisms.

Twilight of the Gods: Wolf's jaw" star cluster may have inspired parts of Ragnarok myth. Passing comets and eclipses may have stoked fears of pending apocalypse.

True Colors: Spanish scientists: EnChroma glasses won't fix your color blindness. Users aren't really seeing new colors, just the same colors in a different way.

Pardon My Reverb: Cave acoustics can help sculpt more realistic sounds in digital space. Mammoth Cave served as "nature's muse" for audio engineer Yuri Lysoivanov.

One Small Step: Behind-the-scenes audio from Apollo 11 mission made public for first time. Long-lost supplementary communications have been unearthed and digitized.

6a00d8341c9c1053ef022ad37ab639200c-320wiMartian Music: The sounds of a Martian sunrise inspire short musical composition. Scientists turned Opportunity's image of the 5,000th sunrise on Mars into music. [Image: NASA]

Love Is a Prison: Wilson Fisk is back and better than ever in season 3 of Daredevil. Vincent D'Onofrio steals every scene as crime boss turned "prisoner of love."

Inconceivable! RIP William Goldman, creator of beloved film, The Princess Bride. Legendary screenwriter's passing takes part of our childhood with him.

For the Throne: Here's the first teaser for the final season of Game of Thrones. No new footage, but it gives a quick tour of major highlights from seasons past. The survivors of the first seven seasons of Game of Thrones will face the Night King and his army of White Walkers and wights in the final season.

Tall Tales: The Old West never looked so quirky in Ballad of Buster Scruggs trailer. The Coen brothers' latest offering gives us six stories in a single film.

"Everyone thought they were Dumbo": New trailer for Disney's live-action Dumbo captures magic of original. Director Tim Burton brings his signature style to a classic animated tale.

Other Cool Links:

Meet the Scientists Using Swarms of "Remote Control" Bacteria to Study Collective Behavior. It's unbelievable to be able to move a joystick and watch an organism that is 10x smaller than the width of my hair move across a screen."

Rubidium Coated Donut: Making atoms dance on a donut may be future for quantum logic. Since its shape defines its state, a Bose Einstein qubit may be unbreakable.

Scottish researchers create 'crystal maze' to control how light spreads.

Making light twist into a bowtie may reveal dark matter. Cork screwing light may be slowed by axions, "simple" experiment may reveal them. Related: A 'Dark Matter Hurricane' is Storming Past Earth. It Could Help Scientists Detect the Strange Substance.

Gravitational waves could solve a cosmological crisis within five years-or shake physics to its core.

Rough and ready quantum memory may link disparate quantum systems.

Cosmological analogues lurk in solid state labs.the presence of dynamos capable of generating and sustaining a magnetic field in readily available metal systems could provide a handy lab-sized model for astronomical phenomena.

Antarctic Neutrinos Are Being Used to Weigh the Earth's Core.

How Cracks Interact with the Sounds They Make: The acoustic waves emitted by a propagating crack can affect the crack's motion and the marks it leaves behind.

Bug covered 'bionic mushroom' generates clean energy. Mushrooms for lunch inspire scientists to try to generate electricity from a fungus covered in bacteria.

How Many Fundamental Constants Does It Take To Explain The Universe?

Physicists report electron is round-what does that mean? Unmeasurably small electric dipole moments kills many Standard Model extensions.

What does sheep herding have in common with rocket science? Compressible flow!

How Will the Avengers Use the Quantum Realm to Defeat Thanos? "Hector Navarro looks at two seemingly tiny tidbits that might reveal some huge insights into just how important the Quantum Realm will be to undoing Thanos' Snapture"

The Expanse Gets Artificial Gravity Right in This Neat Trick. In a scene from season one, Jim Holden shows exquisite command of high school physics as he maneuvers himself onto a spaceship gangway.

Vault dwellers in the Fallout series carry laser weapons to survive, but how powerful could one actually get?

These Fluid-Filled Tiles Could Help Keep the Buildings of the Future Cool.

There is a planet (probably) orbiting Barnard's Star, which is like right around the corner. Not a viable Plan B at this point but maybe Plan S or Plan W.

Mystery space cow" is a weird new type of powerful space explosion. Months of observations have shown that the strange explosion in space called the Cow" gets extra power from within, making it a new type of celestial event.

What do you get when a white dwarf eats a brown dwarf? A very, very energetic cosmic belch.

Predictably, online media go nuts overOumuamua and Harvard scientists. "Scientists are perfectly happy to publish an outlandish idea."

See How the Buoyancy Force Works in Water or Air. The buoyancy force gives you the boost that helps you float and do cool maneuvers in water. This experiment lets you see it in action.

6a00d8341c9c1053ef022ad3c07cb1200b-320wiNectar-drinking species of hummingbirds and bats are both excellent at hovering - one of the toughest aerodynamic feats - but they each have their own ways of doing it. [Image: Lentink Lab/Science News]

NASA and philosophers are teaming up to offer a PhD in the philosophy of space-travel safety at Glasgow University.

How A Volcano (Sort Of) Caused The Middle Ages. In 536 CE, a titanic eruption covered Europe in a cloud.

That time a bunch of underwater mines exploded and the sun was the only suspect.

Aristotle Was Wrong-Very Wrong-But People Still Love Him. Centuries-old ideas about force and motion have an intuitive appeal that is enduring but oh-so-incorrect, as these simple experiments show.

Haunted by His Brother, He Revolutionized Physics: To John Archibald Wheeler, the race to explain time was personal.

The Physics Girl makes the vortex cannon's mouth a square instead of a circle, with some cool results.

Think you're bad at math? You may suffer from math trauma," a form of debilitating mental shutdown when it comes to doing mathematics.

L.R. Ingersoll Physics Museum in Madison, Wisconsin. "Walk through its doors and be surrounded by 70 giant physics experiments and toys, each of them interactive and designed to be played with."

A decade before the Nazis came to power, Albert Einstein warned of the rise of anti-Semitism.

The Oddly Beautiful Results of a Colorful Blob of Jello Struck by a Tennis Racket Shown in Super Slow Motion.

Why It's Almost Impossible to Skip a Stone 89 Times. "Kurt Steiner set the world record for skipping stones by hurling a rock at the water and making it skip an astonishing 88 times. How is that even possible?"

"With some help from Physics Girl and her friends, Grant Sanderson at 3Blue1Brown has a nice video introduction to turbulence, complete with neat homemade laser-sheet illuminations of turbulent flows."

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