Science Daily: Mars
- Surprising insights about debris flows on Mars March 14, 2024
- Giant volcano discovered on Mars March 13, 2024
Science Daily: Uranus
- New images reveal what Neptune and Uranus really look like January 5, 2024
- Ringing in the holidays with ringed planet Uranus December 19, 2023
Science Daily: Pluto
- How Pluto got its heart April 15, 2024
- Evidence of geothermal activity within icy dwarf planets February 15, 2024
Science Daily: Kuiper Belt
- How Pluto got its heart April 15, 2024
- Evidence of geothermal activity within icy dwarf planets February 15, 2024
Month: February 2009
Open Source Physics Educational Java Tools
Well, it’s good news bad news time. I was excited to find these via an article in the Physics Teacher. Clearly, I haven’t been paying attention, because they’ve been mentioned before, but the item which caught my attention was an article that used a program called Tracker to analyze 2D motion. I immediately thought of …
C/2007 N3 Lulin from Brooklyn
Well, sort of. I got out briefly tonight with my wife’s Canon 12×36 IS binoculars (that’s Image Stabilized). The position of Lulin is easy enough to find with Saturn less that 6º away and two reasonably bright star nearby to help zero in on its location – Leo 59 at mag 5 and Leo X-63A …
100 Hours of Astronomy
The canonical website for information is http://www.100hoursofastronomy.org/. This page will be updated with new local to New York and Brooklyn. Keep in mind that there is a weather component to this event, but I hope to be able to sponsor both night viewing and some solar viewing, although the Sun has been very quiescent (no …
Another Reason to Turn off the Lights
Yet another study has found a connection between cancer and night-time lighting. Last time it was breast cancer, this time is it prostate cancer. In Darkness, Melatonin may Suppress Breast and Prostate Cancers, Science News reports on another study that shows a link between burning the midnight oil and human health. The great irony to …
Pendulums
For his science fair project, Jonathan investigated pendulums. His hypothesis was that how fast the pendulum swings, its period, should depend on how heavy it was. So I arranged to have 1-inch diameter pendulum bobs made of copper, steel, and wood. We suspended each from a horizontal beam, carefully measured so they were all the …
How Fast is Sound?
A few months ago, I read an article in The Physics Teacher (published by the American Association of Physics Teachers) on measuring the speed of sound using a couple of microphones hooked up to a computer’s line-in jack. Apart from having to make a trip to Radio Shack to buy some parts to convert two standard unpowered microphones into a pair of powered microphones for stereo input, the process was amazingly straightforward. I did a quick proof-of-concept in the dining room one evening and go