Cracking the Brazil nut problem
Segregation in a bowl of nuts may be akin to condensation in gases
Internet aids the spread of computer viruses
The structure of the Internet allows viruses to propagate surprisingly easily
Physics and the stock market: playing with fire
Combustion theory predicts when shares will jump in value
First evidence for the Brain Drain
Sharp Pierson and Cotgreave of the Save British Science Society analysed the publishing records of 252 scientists who gained their doctoral degrees in the UK. They compared the quality of the scientis...
Read article: The physics of a spinning coin
The physics of a spinning coin
Moffatt became interested in the problem while looking for Christmas presents for his grandchildren. “I came across the toy in a mail order catalogue and thought it sounded interesting,” h...
Physics get physical
For ‘short’ races the average speed of a world-record performance declines sharply with increasing distance. However, above a certain distance, the decline is more gentle. For both running...
The music of earthquakes
Diodati says he became intrigued by the link between music and physics after thinking about the crescendo in Rossini’s La calunnia è un venticello, an aria from the Barber of Seville. The w...
Life, longevity, and a $6000 bet
The disagreement stems from a paper Gott published in Nature several years ago and recently discussed in the New Yorker magazine. In this paper Gott proposed a formula that suggests that by knowing ho...
Theorists tackle the Earth’s core
Dario Alfè, David Price and Mike Gillian of University College London used a Cray T3E supercomputer to calculate that the melting point of iron was 6700 Kelvin, plus or minus 600 Kelvin, at the p...
New hope for the travelling salesman
Kirkpatrick and co-workers found that the computer algorithms used to solve NP-complete problems can undergo sudden phase transitions as the various criteria used to search for a solution are varied. ...
