Applied Physics

Sometimes pop culture becomes fact for the public. When the climate disaster film "The Day After Tomorrow" came out, journalists bizarrely started referencing it as a real climate change scenario, and now that Netflix, the home of anti-science sentiment among streaming services(1), has "Chernobyl" available, people think that is creating mutants.(2) People did die. This was the USSR handling a crisis in Ukraine, a country and people they did not value, and clean-up crews were placed at risk that would have been unnecessary if the dictatorship had allowed outside assistance. Soviets in Russia…

Plasma is like a lightning bolt, when it happens underwater. A new study explored how electrochemical cells that help recycle CO2 but whose catalytic surfaces get worn down in the process might be regenerated at the push of a button - using extreme plasmas in water. To show proof ofconcept, they deployed optical spectroscopy and modeling to analyze such underwater plasmas in detail, which exist only for a few nanoseconds, and to theoretically describe the conditions during plasma ignition. Plasmas are ionized gases: they are formed when a gas is energized that then contains free electrons. In…

Were dinosaurs green? You'd think so going by pop culture imagery but there is no way to know if they were green or grey or something else. A new analysis of a 3 million-year-old mouse fossil shows we may be on the path to knowing if the right fossil ever comes along, though.  Used X-ray spectroscopy and multiple imaging techniques, X-ray beams from SLAC's Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) and the Diamond Light Source (DLS) in the U.K., to detect the delicate chemical signature of pigments in a long-extinct mouse, researchers were able to discover chemical traces of…

If you've swum in the ocean you know it requires a lot of energy, and for ships it is no different. Adding to that are the problems of friction, corrosion, and biofilms, all of which cause marine traveler to drag. Science is on the case. New types of ship coatings that permanently retain an air layer under water and reduce the three problems have been granted the Validation Award by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) in Germany. An air envelope between the ship and the water is the solution and that's based on the salvinia effect. The salvinia effect is named after the…

In 1954, the USS Nautilus, the world's first nuclear-powered submarine, was commissioned, and since then America's nuclear vessels have traveled a distance equivalent to 6,000 times around the globe with no serious incidents. Meanwhile, when a combination of disasters, the Tohoku earthquake and a resulting tsunami, caused a shutdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in 2011, hysterical academics claimed the western coast of the US was going to be poisoned. How can smart people be so wrong about nuclear energy when we are now 70 years into running nuclear-powered subs and aircraft…

A liquid is traditionally defined as a material that adapts its shape to fit a container. Yet under certain conditions, cats seem to fit this definition.     This somewhat paradoxical observation emerged on the web a few years ago and joined the long list of internet memes involving our feline friends. When I first saw this question it made me laugh, and then think. I decided to reformulate it to illustrate some problems at the heart of rheology, the study of the deformations and flows of matter. My study on the rheology of cats won the 2017 Ig Nobel Prize in Physics. The…

The Carr Fire in Shasta and Trinity Counties began July 23rd, 2018 after a tire blew out on a trailer and the rim made sparks on the pavement. setting dry vegetation in an area historically dry ablaze. That's simple bad luck but it caused 359 square miles to burn, estimated to be the seventh largest fire in recorded California history. By the end of August it was contained but not before it led to eight fatalities and destroyed 1,079 residences.  Bad luck was also involved in the "Firenado" that resulted - the right combination of circumstances at the wrong time. On the evening of July…

A fully 3D printed array of light receptors on a hemispherical surface is the first significant step toward creating a "bionic eye." The project began with a hemispherical glass dome to show how they could overcome the challenge of printing electronics on a curved surface. Using a custom-built 3D printer, they started with a base ink of silver particles. The dispensed ink stayed in place and dried uniformly instead of running down the curved surface. The researchers then used semiconducting polymer materials to print photodiodes, which convert light into electricity. The entire process took…

At the time of writing, 436 people have died following an earthquake in the Indonesian island of Lombok. A further 2,500 people have been hospitalized with serious injuries and over 270,000 people have been displaced. Earthquakes are one of the deadliest natural disasters, accounting for just 7.5% of such events between 1994 and 2013 but causing 37% of deaths. And, as with all natural disasters, it isn’t the countries that suffer the most earthquakes that see the biggest losses. Instead, the number of people who die in an earthquake is related to how developed the country is. In Lombok, as in…

If you are up for a job, and four other candidates are weak, your chances are obviously better than if four other candidates are strong. In the World Cup just completed, statistically there will always be a 'Group of Death", wherein a round-robin group will have three strong teams but only two can advance, meaning a world-class squad will be eliminated.  Poker players know to bet low when the odds are only modestly better and to bet high when the statistics show the cards in hand are strong. Timing matters, in jobs, in games, in lots of things.  Sometimes knowing when to play…