Monthly Archives: April 2006

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 Short ▶

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 Announcement ▶

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 Short ▶

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 ▶