Tag: physics

How to Use Physics to Escape an Ice Bowl

I don’t know who invented this crazy challenge, but the idea is to put someone in a carved-out ice bowl and see if they can get out. Check it out! The bowl is shaped like the inside of a sphere, so the higher up the sides you go, the steeper it gets. If you think […]

How to Measure the Earth’s Radius With Legos

More than 2,000 years ago, pretty much every educated human knew the Earth was round. There are some pretty obvious clues, after all. If you travel south, you see stars and constellations you’ve never seen before (because they’re blocked by Earth’s curvature). When a ship comes into port, you see the top of it before […]

How Genes Have Harnessed Physics to Grow Living Things

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Sip a glass of wine, and you will notice liquid continuously weeping down the wetted side of the glass. In 1855, James Thomson, brother of Lord Kelvin, explained in the Philosophical Magazine that these wine “tears” or “legs” result from the difference in surface tension […]

How to Follow the Trajectory of Comet 3I/Atlas

On December 19, it will pass about 270 million kilometers from Earth, almost 700 times the average distance between our planet and the moon. Astronomers believe that for a few days the most powerful telescopes will be able to observe it to better understand its composition. However, because of its distance, it will be impossible […]

How to Make AI Faster and Smarter—With a Little Help from Physics

What exactly is AI Scientist—just a fancy kind of neural net? It’s not a single neural network, but rather an ensemble of computer programs that can help scientists make new discoveries. My group has already developed algorithms that can help with individual tasks, such as weather forecasting, identifying the drivers of global temperature rise, or […]

How to Design a Real-Life Hot Wheels Loop

I get a minimum height of 2.5R. So if the loop is 4 meters high (with a radius of 2 meters), the car would have to start 5 meters above the ground to just make the loop. Of course, this assumes there’s no energy loss due to friction; you’d probably want to start a bit […]

Learn how to recognise and appreciate your efforts

With endless to-do lists, it can be easy to constantly focus on what still needs to be done. We forget that the efforts we have made, the paths we have taken and the experience we have acquired are just as important as the end result. At school, we were taught to expect congratulations based on […]

Roadmap details how to improve exoplanet exploration using the James Webb Space Telescope

A new step-by-step roadmap describes how to improve the efficiency of data gathering with the JWST to benefit the astronomy community at large. “Our hope now is that a large-scale community effort guided by the roadmap can be initiated to yield deliverables at a timely pace,” says MIT Associate Professor Julien de Wit. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech […]