Category: At the seaside
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Goal difference, not points, the best way to rank soccer clubs
I know ya’ll been wonderin’ which soccer team is best. Traditionally, them Europeans rank their teams by points accured during the season: 3 points for a win, 1 for a draw and zilch for a loss. Now a group of German physicists says this ain’t the best way to do it. After analysing all the…
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First observation of Hawking radiation?
In 1974, Stephen Hawking predicted that black holes would emit radiation. So-called Hawking radiation is produced when pairs of virtual particles pop into existence near the event horizon of a black hole (as they do all over the universe). Usually these pairs simply annihilate each other and disappear. But Hawking predicted that in some cases,…
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How plankton blooms are born
Massive plankton blooms are the plague of the oceans. They starve local species by exhausting an ocean of its food and oxygen, they turn vast areas of sea to the colour of milk and have a profound effect on the ocean food web. But where do they come from? Nobody knows. At least they didn’t…
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Inflatable mountains
It’s best to ignore the crazier ideas on the physics arXiv. But every now and again something comes out of left field that is just too extraordinary to pass on. Today, it’s a cheap way of changing the entire climate over relatively small regions of the Earth. Alexander Bolonkin (unaffiliated) suggests that inflatable mountains could…
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How cricketers get their eye in
It’s long been known that batsman in the venerable game of cricket are more likely to get out early in their innings, before they “get their eye in”. Various factors seem to be to blame, such as the time it takes for the batsmen’s footwork to warm up and for them to adapt to the…
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Feline ballistics
Here’s a straightforward question in ballistics: What velocity do you need to launch a 350 pound object over a 12.5 foot barrier that is 33 feet away? The answer, thanks to Raza Syed, a physicist at Northeastern University in Boston, and a pal is: 26.7 miles per hour at an angle of about 55 degrees.…
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The liquid rope coiling effect
Pour syrup onto a pancake and you’ve probably witnessed the elongated thread coiling itself into loops, a phenomenon called the “liquid rope coiling effect”. Scientists have studied this effect for some time and made a number of peculiar observations: for example the frequency of coiling depends in a complicated way on the fall height. Now…
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The tricky task of river delta modelling
Geobods have a problem: they can’t model any geophysical process worth its salt on computer because of the complexity of the processes involved and the timescales over which they take place. It’s just too computationally demanding. One process in particular has defied attempts to model it: river delta formation. But Hansjorg Seybold from the Swiss…
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The electrifying physics of windblown sand
Wind blown sand is a damned nuisance. And not just cos it sandblasts cars, fills the atmosphere with aerosols and makes yer eyes water. Geophysicists ain’t never been able to explain it good ‘n’ proper. Why does the average height of the sand above the ground remain constant as wind speed increases, when their models…
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Lake Baikal’s neutrino dreams
When a neutrino smashes into matter it generates light, lots of it. So stare into the dark night for long enough and you’ll see ’em flash as they pass by. The problem is that neutrino hits are rare events. So you need a big volume of dark and whole lot of time to sit back…