Category Physics

Black and yellow garden spider (Argiope aurantia). Credit: © leekris / Fotolia

Secret of always-taut spider threads inspires new material. Why doesn’t a spider’s web sag in the wind or catapult flies back out like a trampoline? The answer, according to new research by an international team of scientists, lies in the physics behind a ‘hybrid’ material produced by spiders for their webs.

Pulling on a sticky thread in a garden spider’s orb web and letting it snap back reveals that the thread never sags but always stays taut – even when stretched to many times its original length. This is because any loose thread is immediately spooled inside the tiny droplets of watery glue that coat and surround the core gossamer fibres of the web’s capture spiral.

The researchers studied the details of thi...

Cubimorph is a modular interactive device that holds touchscreens on each of the six module faces and that uses a hinge-mounted turntable mechanism to self-reconfigure in the user’s hand. One example is a mobile phone that can transform into a console when a user launches a game. Credit: Image courtesy of University of Bristol

A prototype for an interactive mobile device, called Cubimorph, which can change shape on-demand will be presented this week at one of the leading international forums for robotics, ICRA 2016, in Stockholm, Sweden [16-21 May]. There has been a growing interest toward achieving modular interactive devices in the human computer interaction (HCI) community, but so far existing devices consist of folding displays and barely reach high shape resolution.

Cubimorph is a mod...

The experiment, featuring the small red glow of a BEC trapped in infrared laser beams. Credit: Stuart Hay, ANU

Physicists are putting themselves out of a job, using artificial intelligence to run a complex experiment.The experiment, developed by physicists from Australian National University and UNSW ADFA, created an extremely cold gas trapped in a laser beam, aka Bose-Einstein condensate, replicating the experiment that won the 2001 Nobel Prize. “I didn’t expect the machine could learn to do the experiment itself, from scratch, in under an hour,” said Paul Wigley, ANU Research School of Physics and Engineering.

Bose-Einstein condensates are some of the coldest places in the Universe, far colder than outer space, typically less than a billionth of a degree above 0K...

Scene from Ice Age (2002) processed in the style of The Starry Night. Comparing independent per-frame processing to our time consistent approach, the latter is clearly preferable. Credit: Manuel Ruder, et al.

3 researchers at the University of Freiburg has taken the science of using neural networks to understand the style of paintings done by human hands and applying it to modern photographs, one step further, by applying it to video.

Imagine if you could film a friend with your phone, as he wanders aimlessly down a road on the edges of a quaint village, then use an app to make it look like your friend was wandering through a Starry Night painting, by Vincent Van Gough? It appears the day may be coming when amateur and professional video/movie makers alike may be able to do such things wit...