Sleepysneezeydopeydoc-blog - Physics Nerd

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Blue Angels

I can relate to three out of four of them 🙃

If you put that ball on that machine while it wasn’t spinning, it would just roll straight down the lower sides. 

The raised edges would keep it in the middle line, but it’s only controlled in one direction. By spinning it, you constantly alternate the position of the tall sides, meaning that the ball is held in the middle, never able to fall off.

Particle accelerators control particles in the same way. Magnetic or electric fields can only direct particles in one plane at a time, so to keep a beam of particles rushing down a particle accelerator in one focused stream, the current gradient must constantly oscillate. This means the particles are constantly held in place, never able to shoot off in one direction.

Here’s the same principle in action: these are tiny pollen grains being held in place by an oscillating field. Rods in the four corners of the beam establish a field that oscillates many times a second to keep the pollen trapped. If it didn’t constantly switch, the pollen would all fly off in one direction.

Watch the full film with Dr Suzie Sheehy for more.

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The Worlds of our Solar System

Scientists have discovered a worm that eats plastic bags and leave behind antifreeze

Polyethylene: not your average meal

The wax worm, a caterpillar typically used for fishing bait and known for damaging beehives by eating their wax comb, has now been observed munching on a different material: plastic bags.

Scientist Federica Bertocchini of the Institute of Biomedicine and Biotechnology of Cantabria in Spain first noticed the wax worms’ plastic-eating skills when she was cleaning up a wax worm infestation in one of the beehives she keeps at home. She put the worms in a plastic bag, tied it closed, and put the bag in a room of her house while she finished cleaning the hive. When she returned to the room, “they were everywhere,” Bertocchini said in a statement. They’d escaped by chewing their way out of the bag, and fast.

“This project began there and then,” she said. In a paper published in Current Biology on Monday (April 24), Bertocchini and her colleagues described 100 wax worms chewing through a polyethylene shopping bag—the kind that people discard at a rate of 1 trillion per year globally—in around 40 minutes. After 12 hours, the bag was significantly shredded.

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