What is the ideal length of an oar used in a rowing race? You might think that the answer is simple and would be based on the size and strength of an individual rower. But unlike most other sports, where the size of equipment tends to scale with the athlete, oars used in specific rowing sports tend to be fairly uniform in size.
Now, Michael Benzaquen and colleagues at France’s Ecole Polytechnique have used physics to work-out what size oars are best for specific events and individual rowers. You can find out more in their preprint on arXiv, “Physics of rowing oars”.
The announcement of the first-ever image of a black hole by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) on 10 April created a lot of excitement in physics but it seems to have touched the LEGO community too. At least three black-hole-inspired LEGO designs have been submitted to the LEGO Ideas website, which lets fans share blueprints of their own models.
Luis Peña, who previously made LEGO models of the Hubble Space Telescope and the Mars Curiosity rover, has built a LEGO model of a single antenna belonging to the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, which played a crucial part in the observations. Peña’s design also features a small mosaic of 18×18 studs to illustrate the black hole image.
Accretion disc and jets
LEGO enthusiast “tm.bricks” has created a design consisting of all eight EHT telescopes together with a mosaic of bricks to signify the black hole while “douglasfx” has made a model of the M87* black hole featuring accretion disc and jets.
Peña’s design already has 340 supporters but it will need another 9660 before LEGO conducts a review of it. If any of the models reach the magic 10,000 votes and are also lucky enough to receive the green light by LEGO, then they go into the “development phase” where LEGO designers refine the product and develop it for commercial release.
Make sure you vote for your favourite.
In the random birthday file, Tuesday marked the 156th anniversary of the birth of Max Planck. Canada’s Perimeter Institute has celebrated the birth of the great quantum physicist by publishing a fact sheet about his remarkable life. Did you know, for example, that Planck climbed a 3000 m peak in the Alps at age 85? Or that his son Erwin was involved in the planning of the failed attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1944?
