Highlights from the Blogosphere

This week's good reads:"Can I Break Just One Rib?"WWdN: In ExileWil Wheaton goes roller-skating with his offspring and learns that Newton's laws of motion aren't limited to science class."Is Your Breakfast a Sad and Soggy Affair?"The Guardian/Improbable Research columnFind out why "crunchiness declines in the presence of a soggifying liquid.""It's a Sure Bet"JPL BlogJosh Willis talks about climate change, randomness, and why it's a bad idea to bet against global warming."Test Your Science Savvy".. Read more »

One Hundred Thousand Time's a Charm.

Despite 18 years of orbit and 2.72 million miles traveled, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope continues to dutifully make its way around the Earth.Yesterday, the Hubble completed its 100,000 orbit in space. To celebrate, scientists aimed the telescope at part of a nebula near the star cluster NGC 2074 (about 170,000 light-years away from the Earth), capturing the dazzling display (see picture on left) on camera.The Hubble as been around well, almost as long as I've been alive. In fact, many if not al.. Read more »

In Quest for Speed, Olympic Swimmers Use Physics.

In light of the recent, thrilling accomplishments of the U.S. men's Olympic swim team, I thought it proper to focus on just how much physics goes into every aspect of Olympic swimming- from training and pool design right down to those tiny swim suits.In ultra competitive swimming, flow is everything. Understanding how a swimmers movements or force impacts the water as his or her body gracefully glides and pushes is key to understanding how motion affects flow. Here is where fluid mechanics comes.. Read more »

Highlights from the Blogosphere

"False Alarm for Mars Bug"Cosmic Ray"The Discovery, Re-Discovery, and Re-Re-Discovery of Computed Tomography"Skulls in the Stars"Goodyear's Tire Solution"Stock Car ScienceGood tires can make all the difference. A bit of NASCAR science from the author of The Physics of NASCAR"The Things I Didn't Believe in Graduate School"Star Stryder"What Lies Beneath"Cocktail Party PhysicsScience in the service of art and archaeology"Lightning Car"Top GearOne of the co-hosts of the BBC's long-running auto show,.. Read more »

Not So Smooth: Dark Matter in Lumps and Clumps

A team of cosmologists in the U.S. and Switzerland have created the most complex and intricate dark matter computer simulation yet. For a month, they followed what happens to billions of dark matter particles 20 years after the Big Bang, over a span of 13.7 billion years. The simulation provides, for the first time, a dazzling panoply of the dark matter structure of a typical galaxy; all the way down to extremely tiny, detailed scales. To view a bit of the action, check out the video above.Da.. Read more »

The Sometimes "Ghostly" Results of Citizen Science

GalaxyZoo is a pretty sweet project. It lets your average Joe, i.e., non-astronomer, take part in astronomy research online by classifying galaxies (Quick! Is that a spiral or an elliptical?).Turns out there is no substitute for the good old human eyeball. Our windows to the world can spot unusual patterns in galaxies acutely and quickly; a lot better than computers. Perusing GalaxyZoo archives is how 25 year-old Dutch volunteer Hany van Arkel came across a strange image of a glowing, gaseous ob.. Read more »

The Kind of Water You Might Not Recognize.

Unlike that bottle of Deer Park you take refreshing sips from, this water is a supercritical fluid- the hottest water ever found on Earth.While scientists have managed to make both water and seawater supercritical in laboratories, the phenomena has never be observed in nature until now.Supercritical fluids are highly compressed gases that have both gas and liquid-like properties. This combination gives them special properties that regular fluids don't have. Andrea Koschinsky of Jacobs Universi.. Read more »