I haven’t kept up with the recent Star Wars films, so I didn’t know that trains existed long ago in a galaxy far away. But it turns out that a scene in Solo: A Star Star Wars Story involving Han Solo saving Chewbacca from falling from a speeding train has annoyed some physicists (it appears at two minutes in the above trailer). Rhett Allain investigates complete with free-body diagrams in “The physics of Chewbacca falling out of a moving train”.
What would you do if you had digital images of 140,000 paintings spanning nearly a millennium of history? Being physicists, Higor Sigaki and Haroldo Ribeiro of the Universidade Estadual de Maringá in Brazil and Matjaž Perc of University of Maribor in Slovenia worked-out the entropy and complexity of the paintings. They showed that trends in these parameters are in line with the historical classification of artistic styles. So which period had peak entropy? You’ll have to read “History of art paintings through the lens of entropy and complexity” to find out.
Many readers in the UK will look back fondly on earning their Blue Peter badges – which are issued by the BBC television programme of the same name. This year is 60th (diamond) anniversary of the show, and a special diamond version of the badge has been created by the British designer Henry Holland. Not to be outdone, the company Element Six has unveiled a custom-made synthetic diamond Blue Peter badge that comprises 6.6 carats of polycrystalline diamond made by chemical vapour deposition.
