- How large was the object believed to have caused the Tunguska event, and how much energy did it release?
Everyday and Recreational Physics
Physics found in ordinary phenomena, from coffee sloshing to banana peels.
- What is the connection between sunlight exposure on skin and vitamin D production?
- What did the near-total absence of ancient impact craters on Venus reveal about its geological history?
- How did Haavelmo's 1944 monograph become the methodological foundation for modern econometrics?
- According to Matthews, what would you have to change about your table or your toast to beat the odds?
- How did Len Fisher model biscuit dunking as a problem in capillary action and porous media?
- What balance of forces decides when a dunked biscuit collapses rather than holding together?
- What did the study 'The Collapse of Toilets in Glasgow' actually document?
- What typically caused the ceramic lavatories in the study to fail?
- Why does the entry argue this kind of undignified hazard gets overlooked by safety literature?
- Why can a falling coconut cause a serious head injury given the tree's typical height and fruit weight?
- Why does a shower curtain billow inward and cling to a bather when hot water runs?
- How does Bernoulli's principle explain the low-pressure vortex created by a shower spray?
- What method did David Schmidt use to model and confirm the shower curtain vortex?
- What incident during the 1949 Air Force rocket-sled experiments led to the coining of Murphy's Law?
- Who were the three men credited with the origin of Murphy's Law, and what was each one's role?
- How did Murphy's Law spread from a press conference remark into common language?
- How did Jillian Clarke test the validity of the Five-Second Rule?
- How quickly did food dropped on contaminated tiles pick up E. coli in her experiment?
- What differences did Clarke find between men and women in invoking the Five-Second Rule?
- Why does pitch behave like a solid when struck but flow like a liquid over long timescales?
- How long did Thomas Parnell wait before even opening the sealed funnel of pitch?
- Why did no one, including the dedicated webcam, ever manage to witness a drop actually falling?
- Why did swimmers move at the same speed in the thickened water as in normal water?
- What longstanding debate in fluid dynamics did this experiment settle?
- How many times a day does a woodpecker strike a tree, and at what deceleration force?
- What anatomical features protect a woodpecker's brain from repeated high-speed impacts?
- What rule of thumb did Svenson and Barnes devise for how many photos to take of a group?
- How does lighting condition change the number of exposures needed to avoid a blinking subject?
- What blink statistics did the researchers use to build their formula?
- Why does dry spaghetti almost always break into more than two pieces?
- What earlier physicist tried and failed to solve the spaghetti-breaking problem?
- At what impact energy do full versus empty beer bottles shatter, and why does an empty bottle survive longer?
- Who is the only person to have won both a Nobel Prize and an Ig Nobel Prize?
- How did 1960s Army researchers test whether beards harbour dangerous microbes?
- Did washing fully remove bacteria and viruses from contaminated beards?
- How did researchers test whether socks worn over shoes prevent slipping on ice?
- Did socks over shoes actually outperform ice cleats in the trial?
- What physical factors does the Ponytail Shape Equation combine to predict the shape of a swaying ponytail?
- Why is it physically impossible for a human to run across water on Earth?
- How does the Moon's lower gravity change the biomechanics of running enough to make water-running theoretically possible?
- Why did the researchers rely on modelling rather than an actual experiment on the Moon?
- What compound does a cut onion release that causes eyes to water, and how does it form sulphuric acid in the eye?
- Why had the enzyme behind onion tears gone unnoticed for decades despite the tear-inducing compound being known?
- What substance does a banana peel release under pressure that makes it so slippery?
- How did the researchers compare the slipperiness of banana peel against orange and apple peel?
- How does the friction coefficient of a banana peel compare to wet ice or a waxed floor?
- What is the Deborah number, and how does it distinguish a liquid from a solid?
- Why does a cat poured into a vase count as exhibiting fluid behavior under this measure?
- What makes Fardin's cat-fluidity paper a genuine application of rheology rather than just a joke?
- How did Beseris and colleagues test whether facial hair cushions blows to the jaw?
- What did the synthetic bone experiments show about hairy versus bare samples?
- What evolutionary explanation does the beard-as-armor hypothesis suggest for human facial hair?
- How did the Eindhoven team collect millions of pedestrian trajectories to study crowd behavior?
- What forces of mutual avoidance did the statistical analysis extract from ordinary foot traffic?
- Why do near-misses in a crowd reflect an orderly process rather than chaos?
- How did Murakami's team test the effect of phone distraction on pedestrian flow?
- Why does a single distracted walker degrade traffic flow for everyone nearby, not just themselves?
- How does a mother duck's bow wave generate lift for the ducklings swimming behind her?
- Why does each duckling further back in the line expend less effort than the one in front?
- Why are standard crash-test dummies inadequate for simulating a collision between a car and a moose?
- How did the size of the staring group affect how many passers-by stopped to look up?
- What is the popular misconception about hair whorls and the Coriolis force that this study tested?
- What did the study find about the direction hair whorls spiral in the northern versus southern hemisphere?
- What causes a cacio e pepe emulsion to break into a grainy, clumped sauce?
- What role does starch from pasta-cooking water play in stabilising the cheese-and-water emulsion?
- What threshold temperatures and starch concentrations did the physicists identify for a stable sauce?
- What is the theory of hyperbolic conservation laws and shock waves that Lax developed, and where is it used today?
- How does the Mori-Tanaka technique combine with a three-phase shear lag model to estimate effective elastic properties of hierarchically reinforced composites?