Gwen Mueller is an IT Professional, #dnd Gamer-girl, #coffee drinker, geek in Secondary Education, editor on tumblr #education, curating #science, and #tech resources to inspire lifelong learning with 1/4 cup of #fun.
Physical Impossibilities in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic a.k.a. the best physics video you’ll watch today.
NOTE: The physics in this might not be 100% correct, but this was more for fun than actual science/calculations. Also we had to give it a rating for how physically correct it was, I only used XP and RP which basically meant physics outside this universe.
Yes, it has happened. “Physical Impossibilities in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.” For our project, we had to find three scenes from any movie or TV show and use physics to find out if something was or wasn’t possible. I got 100% on it.
Researchers will be able to simulate the superheated gases that form the sun’s magnetic field with a one-of-a-kind sphere that moved Wednesday into a new physics lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The hollow aluminum sphere, built by four Wisconsin companies for $2.5 million, looks like the famous Death Star from “Star Wars” movies. Weighing 11,000 pounds, it was built to superheat gases to 500,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
Researchers say it will help them study how magnetic fields are generated in planets and stars, and better understand why the sun occasionally spews out particles that affect the Earth as “space weather,” knocking out satellites and even taking down power grids, explained Cary Forest, a UW-Madison physics professor.
New tests at the European science facility CERN yet again confirm the results of their prior experiment which showed faster-than-light particles, reports the BBC and The Washington Post. Back in September, CERN scientists clocked neutrinos — funky, ghostly particles that pass through every square inch of Earth billions of times a second — at 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light. Sixty nanoseconds was all that was needed to confound living physicists by calling into question of the linchpins of modern physics: the Einstein’s theory of relativity, which stipulates that nothing can travel faster than light. Read more.
My kinda textbook!
“The pleasure of working as a scientist is having another series of methods to see how the world around us works. That’s how people should be taught science as young children: a way to approach the world. It’s so much fun that people would use it their whole lives whether or not they go into science.”
The Future Is Now: One of the most respected, senior and widely published professors of psychology, Daryl Bem of Cornell, has just published an articlethat suggests that people — ordinary people — can be altered by experiences they haven’t had yet. Time, he suggests, is leaking. The Future has slipped, unannounced, into the Present. And he thinks he can prove it.
Ever wonder why the marshmellows don’t float to the top of your Lucky Charms, or why Brazil nuts end up on top of a can of mixed nuts?
It’s because of a phenomenon called granular convection, also known as the muesli effect or the Brazil nut effect. Shaking the contents of a container effectively liquidizes them, causing the bigger ones to float and cluster together.
Peter Bier, University of Auckland, demonstrates principles of physics by having a student balance on his shoulders, juggling, while riding a unicycle.
Here’s a really neat 9 minute video on how solid materials work; a physics lesson in packing fractions! If you want to impress, you can get within about 5 M&Ms of the true number using this:
Volume of Jar: 1150 ml Volume of 1 M&M: .715 ml Packing Fraction = 66 1/2% 1150 / 0.715 = 1608 M&Ms 1608 x 66.5% ≈ 1070. (Watch to see how close this is!)
