Now that video meeting services like Zoom are all the rage, you might want to impress your friends and colleagues with a background image from one of the world’s most prestigious centres for physics research. The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI) in Canada has released a series of images including an artist’s impression of two colliding black holes and a dark matter map of the cosmos. But my favourite is an exterior shot of the PI building in Waterloo, Ontario – which I had been planning to visit in June, but have sadly had to cancel.
As well as running Alan’s Factory Outlet in Luray, Virginia, Alan Bernau has a passion for creating science infographics. Back in August 2019, we featured an infographic created by Bernau and his work colleagues about the abundance of matter and energy in the universe. He has just been in touch to let us know about his team’s latest creation, which is called “38 radioactive elements and what they are used for”. The elements are grouped according to their half-lives, with the shortest-lived entries being elements like flerovium and tennessine, which are created in tiny amounts in nuclear physics facilities.
The above video is of Chris Kalogroulis and the beautiful magnetic clock that he built – which bagged him the GSK UK Young Engineer of the Year 2020. The clock’s hidden mechanism has a Heath Robinson/Rube Goldberg feel to it, which contrasts to the simplicity of the clock face.
And finally, we couldn’t leave you without revealing the answers to last week’s Red Folder physics-trivia quiz, which was designed to keep you amused during the global lockdown.
You can hear us discussing the quiz on the latest episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast, but here, for the record, are the answers.
We should add that, since creating the quiz, we’ve started to harbour doubts about the final question, which asked which US institution once offered a professorship to Galileo. We had thought that it was Harvard, but this blog from 2013 questions that “fact”, which just goes to show that crafting quizzes isn’t as easy as it looks.
- C – keyboards
- B – swimming
- A – in a brewery
- D – telescope
- C – dog
- D – shower curtain
- A – Caltech
- C – REM
- D – professional footballer
- B – Harvard University
