Adding a pre-spin affects shuttlecock’s oscillating behavior, depending on direction of rotation. Serious badminton players are constantly exploring different techniques to give them an edge over opponents. One of the latest innovations is the spin serve, a devastatingly effective method in which a player adds a pre-spin just before…
Visitors have unearthed over 35,000 diamonds at Crater of Diamonds State Park since 1972. In southwest Arkansas, the state government runs what might be the world’s most unusual diamond mine. For the price of a movie ticket, anyone can dig for diamonds at Crater of Diamonds State Park—and keep…
Cocaine normally makes the heart race, but in this case the dog was lethargic, with a slower heart rate. Every dog owner knows that canines are natural scavengers and that vigilance is required to ensure they don’t eat toxic substances. But accidental ingestions still happen—like the chihuahua who vets…
The good news is that, for now, Erin appears unlikely to directly strike land. After several days of working its way across the open and at times hostile Atlantic Ocean this week, Hurricane Erin found more favorable conditions and exploded in intensity on Friday night. Shortly before noon on…
New experiments focused on understanding the enigmatic neutrino may offer insights. Everything we see around us, from the ground beneath our feet to the most remote galaxies, is made of matter. For scientists, that has long posed a problem: According to physicists’ best current theories, matter and its counterpart,…
“SpaceX can now proceed with Starship Flight 10 launch operations under its current license.” SpaceX is continuing with final preparations for the 10th full-scale test flight of the company’s enormous Starship rocket after receiving launch approval Friday from the Federal Aviation Administration. Engineers completed a final test of Starship’s…
Why is China’s heavy-lift Long March 5B able to launch only 10 Guowang satellites at a time? Welcome to Edition 8.06 of the Rocket Report! Two of the world’s most storied rocket builders not named SpaceX achieved major successes this week. Arianespace’s Ariane 6 rocket launched from French Guiana…
The Inca Empire hung by a thread—literally. Inca bureaucrats recorded all the goings-on in their bustling empire using knotted cords called khipu, where the position and order of the knots represented numbers. They relied on the khipu system to track people, taxes, produce, livestock, and products like woven cloth…
VA Tech experiment was inspired by Death Valley’s mysterious “sailing stones” at Racetrack Playa. Scientists have figured out how to make frozen discs of ice self-propel across a patterned metal surface, according to a new paper published in the journal ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces. It’s the latest breakthrough…
Photophoresis can generate a tiny bit of lift without any moving parts. Most people would recognize the device in the image above, although they probably wouldn’t know it by its formal name: the Crookes radiometer. As its name implies, placing the radiometer in light produces a measurable change: the…
