Applied Physics
About once a week I use some specialized chemistry and physics to blow up cars for movies. Here's a little video revealing how that works, that I shot while creating a scene for Rooster Teeth...
How That Works: Movie Car Explosions from Steve Wolf on Vimeo.
Miniaturization is in - but often the batteries that power them are as large or larger than the devices themselves, which defeats the purpose of building small.
Nowm a team of researchers has shown that 3D printing can be used to print lithium-ion microbatteries the size of a grain of sand. The printed microbatteries could supply electricity to tiny devices in fields from medicine to communications, including many that have lingered on lab benches for lack of a battery small enough to fit the device, yet provide enough stored energy to power them.
To make the microbatteries, the team based at…
To our forefathers, distinguishing the living from the dead centered on calidum innatum - vital heat. Aristotle showed that when the heart turns cold, compared to other organs, a person dies and postulated that the vital heat produced in the heart caused blood vessels to react like water bubbles in boiling water - heat which our lungs cooled with air, to keep the cycle going. Modern microbiology knows body heat is not what the ancients envisioned and is more complex than an organ; biological processes should produce thermal signatures no matter how small, even within single cells, it was just…
If you want to design new materials that are durable, lightweight and environmentally sustainable, it makes sense to look at old kinds: Natural composites, such as bone. Bone is strong and tough because its two constituent materials, soft collagen protein and stiff hydroxyapatite mineral, are arranged in complex hierarchical patterns that change at every scale of the composite, from the micro up to the macro.
While researchers have come up with hierarchical structures in the design of new materials, going from a computer model to the production of physical artifacts has been a persistent…
If you've been to a whispering gallery, a quiet, circular space often underneath a dome or vault that captures and amplifies sounds as quiet as a whisper, you have witnessed parabolics in action. The sound waves are efficiently propagated by the concave surface and similar whispering-gallery waves are evident in light.
Researchers are applying similar principles in the development optomechanical sensors that will help unlock vibrational secrets of chemical and biological samples at the nanoscale.
In glass microcavities that function as optical whispering galleries, according to Bahl, these…
The last open seam on the steel outer cover of the Wendelstein 7-X fusion device was closed last week, which means the core of fusion device and the installation stage has been completed and it can go into operation at the Greifswald branch institute of Max Planck Institute of Plasma Physics (IPP) in 2014.
The ring-shaped device is being installed as five almost structurally identical modules: Each of the five sections of the plasma vessel, along which 14 magnet coils are strung, is enclosed by a steel outer sheath, weighing altogether 120 tons. The five modules form a steel ring from which…
When a magnet is divided, a new magnet with north and south poles is always created. A monopole, i.e. a north pole without a south pole or a south pole without a north pole has not yet been discovered but in Science researchers describe the discovery of new type of artificial monopole in a solid, i.e. particles, which have similar characteristics to monopoles, but which only exist within materials.
To create artificial magnetic monopoles, the scientists merged tiny magnetic whirls, skyrmions, and at the point of merging, the physicists were able to create a monopole, which has similar…
Dr. Ian Marcus, recent Ph.D. from the U.C. Riverside Bourns College of Engineering, wanted to better understand how bacteria impact the environment . So he spent nearly a year building a system that replicates a human colon, septic tank and groundwater and "fed" the colon three times a day during week-long experiments to simulate human eating.
scientists typically study bacteria in an isolated environment under ideal growing conditions. That presents a problem because bacteria typically proliferate in microbial communities with other microorganisms such as archaea, fungi and…
Sourcing of ancient artifacts has gotten a new advance.
While at the University of Sheffield in the years 1965–1972, Professor Lord Colin Renfrew developed a technique that matched stone tools made of obsidian, naturally occurring glass, to their volcanic origins based on their chemical fingerprints. It was considered one of the greatest successes in scientific archeology, matching artifacts to specific volcanoes was a significant leap forward in understanding trade, contact, and cultural change in the ancient world.
40 years later, Dr. Ellery Frahm from Sheffield has developed the new…
Direct current (DC)
In a DC (direct current) circuit where the electricity flows in one direction, we can think of a battery as a storage tank like the water tower in your neighborhood. If nobody turned on their faucet, the water in the tower would just sit there. Forever. Physicists like to think of this as "potential energy." Like a boulder at the top of a hill, it will just sit there, forever, until someone pushes it over the hill or an earthquake shakes it from the top of the hill or erosion undermines it starting it to roll down the hill. When the boulder is rolling down the hill,…