Applied Physics

Fingerprints are essential for crime dramas and look nicely distinct for each of us but what are fingerprints really for? According to Roland Ennos, from the University of Manchester, other primates and tree-climbing koalas have fingerprints and some South American monkeys have ridged pads on their tree-gripping tails, so everyone presumed that fingerprints are there to help us hang onto objects that we grasp. This theory that fingerprints increase friction between the skin and whatever we grab onto has been around for over 100 years, but no one had directly tested the idea. Having already…

If you've ever been an engineering student, taught engineering or hired a young engineer, this will sound familiar: tales of students splitting up group projects so they don't have to work together or a student stating he didn't bother with the directions but still got the right answer or students who do the whole project an hour before class. Expert engineers waiting to happen?  Maybe some day, but that stuff irks hiring managers in the real world, where huge mistakes and sloppy work bring on costly overruns and maybe lawsuits. Keep the creativity, but a little more emphasis on team…

Just came across a really cool article, about a recent discovery where scientists have found a way to make a metal absorb water, transport it over distances just like a tree absorbs water from roots! I think this discovery can have numerous applications, amazing!

Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated entanglement—a phenomenon peculiar to the atomic-scale quantum world—in a mechanical system similar to those in the macroscopic everyday world. The work extends the boundaries of the arena where quantum behavior can be observed and shows how laboratory technology might be scaled up to build a functional quantum computer.  The research involves a bizarre intertwining between two pairs of vibrating ions (charged atoms) such that the pairs vibrate in unison, even when separated in space. Each pair of…

Quick, who was the feared hitter that legendary baseball numbers guru Bill James says lost more career home runs due to playing in his home park than any player in history?    If you guessed Joe DiMaggio then you, like me, regard him as the greatest player of all time(1); he was Willie Mays, except without the loose cap and able to read hitters so perfectly he rarely had to fly all over the field.   Yankee Stadium, "The House That Ruth Built" had a short right field fence, to benefit its archetype left handed hitter, and a cavernous left field, 457 feet at left center(2).…

Tetris stole hundreds of hours of our lives.  It’s about time it starts giving back.  Researchers at the Washington University of St. Louis have built a computer simulation that uses a modified Tetris game to explore self-assembly.  Their take on the classic puzzle game confirms what Tetris junkies have always known: The T-shaped tetromino is insanely versatile, and the L and Z tetrominoes just can’t get along.   Gelb’s version of Tetris mimics molecules being shot at a flat surface. One possible outcome: the molecules may form an ordered layer that minimizes the free…

Scott Altman is a pretty cool guy.   He's the commander of the Atlantis mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope (and, as noted previously, astronaut John Grunsfeld is also carrying along Edwin Hubble's basketball, another level of awesome) and being commander of a space shuttle mission is nice, though I generally think NASA has lost both its way and the imagination of the public by manning a fleet of delivery trucks instead of doing actual space exploration.    No, Altman is cool because he was one of the stunt pilots in "Top Gun." Sure, that just meant he had to fly Tom…

If pizza isn't already on the list of 7 greatest inventions of the post-modern world (because nothing goes with wanting to strangle someone who invokes Foucault like a nice slice of pepperoni) a new discovery may put it there; the physics of the perfect pizza toss have inspired Monash University to design the next generation of micro motors  ... thinner that a human hair. Daniel (Kuang-Chen) Liu, a PhD student supervised by Associate Professor James Friend and Senior Lecturer Leslie Yeo from Monash's Micro/Nanophysics Research Laboratory, videotaped a professional pizza tosser at work.…

(Sensors in the skin - does that sound like Frank Sinatra singing?) Of the professors at Reading University, perhaps the one with the highest media profile is Kevin Warwick, well known for planting microchips inside himself as signalling devices. However, it seems that nature, as so often happens, got there first.  About a year ago, news emerged from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, of evidence that the helically shaped sweat ducts in human skin act as an array of low-Q helical antennas. Recently, I saw this work presented at the Dielectrics 2009 conference in Reading.   We…

A piece of chalk in a laboratory at the University of Stavanger in Norway may be the key to unlocking a great mystery. If the mystery is solved, it will generate billions in additional income.  Okay, it will be billions of dollars  for the oil industry and Arabs aren't exactly doing great things with their money now but uncovering the mechanisms behind 'water weakening' could provide crucial knowledge for oil companies to be able to predict reservoirs’ behavior. Associate Professor Merete Vadla Madland at the Department of Petroleum Engineering at the University of Stavanger is…