Is Elon Musk crazy or just awesome? This week, the serial CEO (Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink) posted on Twitter about yet another one of his ventures, the super fast tube-based transportation system called hyperloop. Is this even possible? Let's do some quick calculations. First, what is the speed of sound? I am assuming that Elon is […]
The month-long launch window for NASA’s new Mars lander, InSight opens this weekend. InSight will be the first spacecraft to use a robotic arm to place its instruments on another planet’s soil—effectively unraveling the innards of the Red Planet. It’s also the first interplanetary mission to launch from the West Coast instead of Cape Canaveral, […]
I like to spend time outside when possible. On a recent adventure I took a couple of the kids to check out some trails near my mother's house. This particular place was pretty nice. It had a lake with some cliffs you could walk along. Note: Do not jump off the cliffs into the water—there […]
Nick Papadopoulos tracks down tumors for a living. Not with X-rays or CT scans, but with DNA. The oncologist and director of translational genetics at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center has spent decades uncovering the unique sets of mutations that define cancers—the kind of genetic signals that not only drive tumor formation and metastasis, […]
Occasionally there are physics lab demonstrations that I think are pretty awesome but that my students just think are "meh." This is one of those cases. The basic idea in this demo, which I used in my class at Southeastern Louisiana University, is to swing a mass around in a horizontal circle. But wait! There's […]
It's hard not to like BattleBots. It is essentially a modern technology-based sporting event in which teams build remote controlled robot-like things that fight in an arena. Two robots enter, one robot leaves—and on May 11, the eighth season of the showdown begins. Of course, there are many engineering aspects of these bots—but underlying every […]
This is a cooler physics problem than I initially realized. It goes something like this. Here, a picture will help. Let's do this. I will start with a force diagram. There are four forces acting on this block: downward gravitational force, the force from the push, a frictional force, and a normal force from the […]
The phrase "heat engine" might trigger some bad memories from your introductory thermodynamics course. But don't worry, I am going to show you the coolest heat engine you could possibly image—the thermoelectric generator (TEG). The basic idea behind a heat engine is to draw some useful energy out of a temperature difference. This output energy […]
The mantis shrimp is neither a mantis nor a shrimp, but it does wield perhaps the most stunning strike in the animal kingdom. Sitting below its face are two hammers, which the crustacean cocks back and launches at its prey with such speed that it shatters snail shells and tears crabs’ limbs right of their […]
If you’ve been putting off your flu shot until the season really gets going, wait no longer. It’s already here—and it’s looking like it’s going to be a doozy. Influenza viruses quietly circulate year-round in the US, but every winter they go big, triggering a seasonal epidemic of sniffles, sweats, and sore throats. And this […]