Beautiful Science

Physics Toys Tuesday: Colored shadows

May 27, 2009

I’m not actually committing to posting a physics toy every Tuesday, but I’ll start small. One of my favorite places to watch people back at the Exploratorium was the colored shadows exhibit.  This one’s always a winner. Images from http://www.flickr.com/photos/soyunterrorista This is an example of color addition.  Remember this from grade school? I only remember [...]

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Why does soap form bubbles?

May 2, 2009

I got a good question on my Adopt a Physicist forum last week, from an 8th-grader named, for privacy purposes, “S.F.”  I asked them to look around for interesting things around them and ask me about the physics of them.  He/she wrote: Actually today I did notice some strange things.  I was washing my hands, and [...]

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The inner beauty of everyday objects

April 8, 2009

A (sort of) recent story in the NY Times highlighted the wonderful work of Satre Stuelke, a medical student and former art professor who co-opted the CT scanner for his own aesthetic purposes.  Below is just one of the images that resulted — a wind-up toy bunny: This is a tin wind-up drumming bunny toy. [...]

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Flounder x-ray & other beautiful things

April 3, 2009

Wow, I just stumbled upon this and it was so beautiful I had to share: Thanks to Tibchris on Flickr for posting this (and making it available with Creative Commons). If you’re looking for freely available images for presentations or in-class use, there are two great places to look: Wikimedia Commons images are all licensed [...]

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Cabspotting: San Francisco cab tracker reveals the life of the city

March 14, 2009

A recent post over at Working Knowledge (Measuring the Intangible) about how Barcelona plotted Flickr photos on a map of Spain to reveal favorite tourist locations reminded me about a really neat site at the Exploratorium.  This is a great example of enhanced mapping – taking some interesting available public data to find out someone [...]

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Flame in space

March 1, 2009

A beautiful video of what a flame does in space. This is a good video to use in a classroom physics or chemistry lesson on convection. Convection needs gravity in order to draw flames upward (ie., “heat rises”). Without gravity, there’s nothing to draw the heat and energy of the flame in any particular direction. [...]

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Pretty traces of light!

February 1, 2009

Welcome to the first post at the new blog location!  Now that my webhome is established I can start posting more regularly.  Geek on! Sebastien Martin of the Exploratorium has been working with what you can do with light traces — basically, tracing out the motion of something through space using light (say, by attaching [...]

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Things to do in a microwave #5: Microwave a lightbulb

February 1, 2009

Everybody’s favorite — microwaving a lightbulb.  Pretty! At least two posts suggest that if you put the bulb in a mug of water (with the bulb part sticking up) then it won’t explode.  I believe that’s because the water acts as a dump for the microwave energy, keeping the bulb from heating up out of [...]

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Science for the holidays

December 26, 2008

A few cool things about science that relate to the holidays.  I wrote this *before* Christmas, but, oh well, better late than never? Dot Physics has a wonderful post on why Christmas tree lights stay lit even when one of them burns out, which is an unusual way for a series circuit to work.  Some [...]

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The mathematics of a bouncing ball

December 5, 2008

Have you ever really listened to the sound of a bouncing ball? There’s some elegant mathematics to be had in this simple thing. In this episode of my Science Teaching Tips podcast, staff educator and physicist Tom Humphrey takes us to the most perfect bouncing ball I’ve ever seen (or heard) — an exhibit at [...]

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PhD Science Dance Contest!

October 13, 2008

How did I not hear of this before?  The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is sponsoring a dance contest! The deadline is November 16.  Your job?  To interpret your PhD thesis in dance form. The contest is open to anyone who has (or is pursuing) a Ph.D. in any scientific field, such [...]

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Beautiful slime molds

October 2, 2008

Several amazing photos of slime mold. Gorgeous! Slime and mold are two words guaranteed to send a shiver down many a spine. However, plasmodial slime molds, fungus – like organisms with about eight hundred and fifty species worldwide – possess a strange beauty that you might not expect. Come and take a look at a [...]

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Seeing motion with light

September 29, 2008

A fabulous science activity from Sebastien Martin over at the Exploratorium, via teacher Bree Barnett — visualizing kinetics with LED lights. See detailed instructions and more pictures over at that blog post.

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Myth 1: Is glass liquid? (Addendum)

September 16, 2008

This is an addendum to my earlier (and popular) post about whether or not glass is a liquid.  If you haven’t read the previous post, the crux of the myth is that many of us are taught in science class that glass is a veeerry slow flowing liquid, and that’s why old windows are thicker [...]

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The physics of baseball (and the bat marimba!)

September 11, 2008

The Exploratorium has done a lot of fun stuff with the physics of baseball, including a whole website devoted to the science of baseball (where’s the sweet spot on the bat? What are baseballs made of?). One of our senior artists, Dave Barker, has also created the Bat Marimba (photo above). I’ve just posted a [...]

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NASA Images Site

August 31, 2008

Phil Plait over at Bad Astronomy just spread the word about a sort-of-new NASA site with beautiful zoomable images from NASA. Phil writes: They have a ton of very cool images there, I must say. When they load, they are fitted to your screen, but then you can zoom in or out, which is fun. [...]

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Eclipse photos from earlier this month

August 16, 2008

The Exploratorium has a Flickr site devoted to images of the eclipse, and a link to a really neat video of the eclipse as seen at 27,000 feet.

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Light walk

July 18, 2008

This photo was posted by a teacher who took her own light walk… Notice how all the light patches on the ground are round. That’s because the spaces in the leaves in the trees — though they’re not round — act like pinholes. The round spots are images of the sun. This is true — [...]

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The PIE idea library

July 6, 2008

I just realized that the PIE institute has a wonderful website! PIE is “Playful Invention and Exploration” – or integrating engineering with artistic expression. Their web page is a treasure chest for any maker… let me tell you (especially those of you who like to hack and Make and all that), it’s a delightful creative [...]

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The antislit

July 3, 2008

Sorry for the long delay in posting (not that it matters — I see my stats — most of you are off reading my old posts about how water goes around drains or whether polar bear fur is fiber optic). I’ve been on vacation back in my old haunts in the SF Bay Area, and [...]

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