Without a doubt baseball has had more serious study behind it than any other major sport. It’s hard to say why this is, but we don’t see academic studies on the flight trajectories of footballs or the effect of “soft rims” on basketballs but we do see plenty of research on baseball. Scholarly research papers on baseball have titles like, “An Experimental and Finite Element Study of the Relationship amongst the Sweetspot, COP, and Vibration Nodes in Baseball Bats” and “Determining Baseball Bat Performance Using a Conservation Equations Model with Field Test Validation.”

Very rarely do these scientists, mostly physicists, offer practical advice for players to take into the field, but they do come up with some interesting observations. And almost all of them have to do with the baseball-bat “collision sequence.”

Read the rest of this article »

The Big Bang theory is a major marvel of science. It is a conclusion drawn from the collusion of several scientists’ work and observation that all fit together and formed a theory so vast as to explain the universe itself. No one mind can be credited with the idea; Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity served as the nidus, and Georges-Henri Lemaître built on that to propose the Big Bang. Observations of Edwin Hubble and George Gamow also played a role in writing the birth of the universe.

But the poet Edgar Allan Poe may have beaten them to it by a hundred years.

Read the rest of this article »

Boeing PelicanA concept aircraft currently under development at Boeing’s Phantom Works Research and Development unit might be the largest airplane to ever fly, but it won’t set any altitude records. Its called the Pelican and it would have a normal cruising altitude of only twenty feet because it uses the concept of ground effect to achieve lift.

Performance specifications say this ground effect vehicle (GEV) will have a wingspan of 150 meters and be able to carry up to 1,400 tons of cargo. By comparison the current giant of the skies, the Russian An-225, has an 88.4-meter wingspan and can lift 250 tons.

Read the rest of this article »

Dr. Schiffer’s patient was thirty-seven when he laughed his way through his best friend’s funeral. At that time he had been confined to a wheelchair for five years by multiple sclerosis. He had been laughing his way through virtually everything for nearly two. Not because he was amused, but because he could not control his laughter. He suffered as many as eighty outbursts of raucous laughter a day, yet his mental state was profoundly depressed.

This patient suffered from a condition known variously as emotional lability, pseudobulbar affect, emotional incontinence, and pathological laughing and weeping. While little known outside the neurological community, it’s surprisingly common, affecting as many as 10% of patients with multiple sclerosis, 15% of patients with Alzheimer’s, and up to 49% of patients with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease). It can also affect patients with stroke, head trauma, epilepsy, or almost any other condition that seriously affects the neurological system. It is characterized by uncontrollable laughing or crying without underlying feelings of amusement or sadness.

Read the rest of this article »

Traditional batteries: will we finally get a new design?Battery science has traditionally been the slowpoke of the technological industry. Look at a few of its competitors – in the last fifty years, screens have gone from black-and-white to color; from grainy cathode ray tube screens to high-definition plasma. Computers that used to be housed in gigantic warehouses, using thousands of vacuum tubes, are now overpowered by tiny boxes that sit on every college students’ desk. Processors, found in most modern devices, are built on an atomic scale.

Yet the batteries we use today are still based upon the same technology that was developed by Alessandro Volta over two hundred years ago. They are large, lose electrical charge with time, can leak dangerous acids, and even sometimes explode with misuse. But now, there comes new technology to finally replace the old – the nanobattery.

Read the rest of this article »

The phenomenon of near death experiences (NDEs) are as old as life itself, and to some people they are spiritual and moving tales that affirm a life after death, and interpreted as indisputable proof of the existence of god.

For any not already familiar, in the west most of the NDEs contain some basic points, where a person who dies floats out of the body, and looks back at the remains from a point above. The period of this external watching varies in time from a few seconds to more than an hour. There is a generally a feeling a weightlessness. Almost invariably the deceased succumbs to a second stage, of being drawn to a tunnel with a clear, white light at the end. Sometimes they are drawn in by a gentle, deep voice, sometimes by the beckoning of loved ones, and sometimes by an indescribable urge. Sometimes they reach the light, and sometimes they do not. There is often a period of watching the events of one’s own life as a panoramic, and some report conversations with god, usually Jesus. Then, inevitably in order to come back to life and tell the tale, the deceased must return to life. The means that turns them back is variegated, but some common examples include an angelic messenger turning them back because their time has not yet come, a previously deceased family member sending them back, or turning away from the light of their own accord for the love of those left behind.

In fact, among western cultures, stories of NDE so closely follow these lines most every time that at first examination, one might think there is outside power directing them along the same road. Studies in other parts of the world are starting to confirm that NDE in their regions also consistently follow a pattern … but that pattern varies depending on the culture involved.

Read the rest of this article »

The Spectrogram of the BloopDuring the Cold War, the United States Navy erected a vast array of underwater listening devices in order to detect and track Soviet nuclear submarines. These hydrophones were placed at roughly 3,000 mile intervals in the deep layer of water known as the deep sound channel, where cold temperatures and high pressures allow sound waves to propagate great distances. When the Cold War ended, rather than mothballing the Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS), the U.S. Navy lent the Cold War relic to science.

The array has since been used to track many fascinating undersea events, such as whale migrations, earthquakes, ocean currents, volcanic activity , and the shifting of Antarctic ice. But one sound captured by the sensitive SOSUS hydrophones has scientists puzzled. It fits the profile of a living creature, but for a creature to create this sound it would have to be significantly larger than a blue whale, which is believed to be the largest animal ever to have lived.

Read the rest of this article »

Photo courtesy Philip G. ZimbardoIn 1963 1971, a study about prisons was funded by the U.S. Navy to try to better understand problems in the Marine Corps.’ prisons. The study was run by a group of researchers at Stanford, led by psychologist Philip G. Zimbardo. The idea was to create a controlled environment in the Stanford halls to simulate a prison. There would be participants recruited to play both the prisoners and the guards, and the experiment would last for two weeks.

No one thought the experiment would have any big problems – the participants were just playing a short game of prison. Yet in less than a week the prisoners were becoming psychologically disturbed, and the guards disturbingly sadistic. There were riots, hunger strikes, and abusive treatment – all in the mock-up jail cells created in the halls of the Stanford psychology department. The study had to be canceled early, leaving one critical question – how could a fake prison situation become real so quickly?

Read the rest of this article »