Now stretch it really hard and quickly hold it to your upper lip, which is sensitive to temperature. You will feel that it’s warmer than it was before. That’s because you’re adding energy to the rubber band, which increases its temperature. Are you ready for the awesome part? Keep it stretched for a little while … Read more
Illustration: Rhett Allain You can see that we have a right triangle with the hypotenuse equal to the distance from the observer’s eyes to the center of the Earth (R + h), with the other two sides being just R and the distance to the horizon (s). Using the Pythagorean theorem, we can solve for … Read more
It’s been crazy cold this week, even down where I live in Louisiana, thanks to an outbreak of a polar vortex. This frigid air is bad for all kinds of things, including football helmets, apparently. But it’s actually a great time to demonstrate one of the basic ideas in science: the ideal gas law. You … Read more
The rubber band example does indeed have two nodes—they are at the ends of the rubber band where your fingers hold it. We only have half a wavelength in the standing wave, but there is indeed a relationship between the length of the rubber band and the size of the wavelength. Guitar Strings It’s time … Read more
There’s some cool stuff going on here. Notice that for the objects with air resistance, they all reach incredibly high velocities as they fall in the upper atmosphere where they encounter very little air resistance. However, once they get into the thicker air they slow down. The cockroach slows in a weird way because my … Read more
This also works the other way: Incoming electromagnetic waves will get canceled by the moving charges in the Faraday cage. Your phone won’t know that it’s getting a text message or call. Let’s focus for a minute on why the cage’s materials are important. A Faraday cage is made from an electrical conductor, metals like … Read more
In the event you drop an object, it should fall. It is a movement that we’ve all seen a whole lot of occasions. We’ve additionally all seen loads of the moon, which makes one full orbit round our planet each 27.3 days (as seen from the Earth). Falling and orbiting might look like radically various … Read more