Astronauts have to contend with a number of unusual issues while living on the space station. Possibly the biggest difference between life up there and life down here is the apparent “weightlessness”: ...
Have you ever seen one of those roller coasters that shoots out of the station at an insanely high speed? These roller coasters don’t need to climb hills first to use gravitational potential energy—th ...
Hitting a baseball with a bat is said to be one of the most difficult things to do in sports. The ball comes at you at speeds exceeding 80 mph, and as the ball travels from the pitcher’s mound to home ...
A bullet is fired from a gun held parallel to the ground. At the exact same moment, a second bullet is dropped from the same height as the gun. Which bullet hits the ground first?The answer to this cl ...
The final shot in the pool game is yours, but the cue and the eight ball aren’t nicely lined up with any of the pockets. Looking around, the closest pocket is 45 degrees off the line between the two b ...
Sometimes, physics can be used to create beautiful art. Kinetic art is art that relies on motion to achieve a specific effect. Often that motion is just an application of simple laws of physics. Waves ...
Ever notice that a conventional roller coaster never goes higher than its first hill? Roller coasters always have to end lower than where they started because of a fundamental idea called the conserva ...
Ever wanted to know how high and how fast you can kick a football? Turns out, it’s pretty easy to figure out. All you need to know is how far away from you the ball lands and how much time it spends i ...
You may have learned that the Moon goes around the Earth and the Earth goes around the Sun. But that’s not quite right. Strictly speaking, the Moon and Earth orbit each other.The barycenter is the poi ...
Planets, asteroids, and comets don’t travel around the sun in perfect circles. Their orbits are stretched out into a shape called an ellipse. The sun, rather sitting right in the center of the shape f ...