Physics Week in Review: January 19, 2019
Among this week's highlights: the fluid dynamics of hagfish snot, LIGO disputes claims of galaxy-warped gravitational waves, and measuring gravity by dropping individual atoms.
Me at Ars Technica:
Meet the Snot Snake: It's the drag that helps the humble hagfish slime predators so quickly. Hagfish can produce one liter of slime in mere fractions of a second.
Everyone's a Critic: Intrepid scientist corrects physiology in Gulliver's Travels after 300 years. Jonathan Swift miscalculated some of the scaling in his 1726 satirical masterpiece. "Kuroki gave a presentation on his analyses to his fellow book club members. They 'appreciated that they now had a better image of these fictitious peoples, but added that it was a unique but not necessarily proper viewpoint from which to consider this book. I agreed.'"
Myth: Busted. Mona Lisa effect" is real but doesn't apply to Leonardo's painting. Sensation typically occurs when subject's gaze is at angle between 0 and 5 degrees. [Image: CITEC/Bielefeld University]
Size Matters: Hermit crabs evolved longer penises to keep their shells from being stolen. Biologist Mark Laidre dubbed his hypothesis "private parts for private property."
Eurotrip: Spidey takes on the Elementals in first Spider Man: Far From Home trailer. We also get a first glimpse of Jake Gyllenhaal's Mysterio-more ally than villain.
"Here we go": Here's the action-packed first trailer for John Wick: Chapter 3-Parabellum. The third installment in thriller franchise looks almost as good as original film.
Other Cool Links:
Has LIGO Seen Galaxy-Warped Gravitational Waves? Nobel laureate George Smoot claims LIGO has observed amplified signals of black hole mergers from the very distant universe, but LIGO scientists disagree.
CERN's New Collider Design, the Future Circular Collider, Is Four Times Larger Than the LHC.
A Floating Glass Bead Could Help Physicists Probe the Unknown. New tabletop sensors could be sensitive enough to glimpse gravitational waves and even dark matter particles.
To Measure Gravity, Scientists Drop Individual Atoms. "Normally we don't notice because the wavelengths" of matter are typically tiny-and yet, University of Otaga researcher Shijie Chai and his colleagues, Dr. Mikkel Andersen and Dr. Julia Fekete, have found a way to manipulate them into yielding a precise measurement of the gravitational field."
To Save the Sound of a Stradivarius, a Whole City Must Keep Quiet. The Vesuvius" violin, made by Antonio Stradivari in 1727, in the Museo del Violino in Cremona, Italy. The museum is assisting with an ambitious recording project to preserve the sound of Stradivarius instruments for future generations.
In This Brutal Titan Games Event, Friction Is The Real Winner. Sure, you need big muscles to win the Lunar Impact event in Dwayne Johnson's new reality show. But you won't get anywhere without friction.
Mathematician's record-beating formula can generate 50 prime numbers. Figuring out the pattern of the primes is one of the long-standing mysteries of maths, and now there is a way to spit some out on demand.
True Facts About Cosmology (or, Misconceptions Skewered).
Bosons and Bubbles: Building a Universe from Scratch. "matter is a new [crystalline] phase of the Universe, a phase when the Higgs boson is turned on."
How Does Aquaman Swim at Supersonic Speeds?
When the new definition of a kilogram takes effect in May, Le Grand K," the official arbiter of weight measurement for well over a century, will face a Pluto-style demotion. / See also my 2016 Gizmodo article about redefining the kilogram.
A Flying Tesla? Sure! We Calculate the Power Demands. Elon says he'd use SpaceX propulsion tech to make a Roadster take flight, and we have thoughts.
Researchers are using mathematics to study different ways of reducing or eliminating the transmission of mosquito-borne diseases to humans.
Comet Encke was discovered on this day in 1786. A century later, a forgotten woman wrote about it in a way that pioneered the poetics of astronomy a century before Carl Sagan.
Ibn Sahl discovered "Snell's Law of refraction" centuries before Snell did. Should a degree in science require students to evaluate their process of producing knowledge?
2018 Nobel Physics Prize Winner Donna Stickland: Give Scientists Time to Make 'Curiosity-Driven' Discoveries.
Physics Is Not In Crisis: "We're not breaking much new ground in high-energy theory, sure, but it's an exciting time to be a physicist in many other subfields."
World's Oldest Known Periodic Table Found During Cleanup of Scottish Lab.
English polymath Robert Fludd's Memory Tricks (1617): Robert Fludd's alphabet of correspondences, where each letter and number is paired with an object which echoes its shape.
Being a Hollywood Science Consultant Isn't Exactly Glamorous. It's not all fact-checking physics and rubbing elbows with celebs, it turns out.
Building on her earlier fluid-dynamics research about the Boston Molasses Flood, Nicole Sharp made this new video. See also my 2016 article for New Scientist about the physics of this historical event.
Complex Math Made Simple With Engaging Animations: Fourier Transform, Calculus, Linear Algebra, Neural Networks & More.