Natural World – Page 23 – Montessori Muddle

The Rolling Shutter Effect

When you pluck a guitar string, the string moves up and down really fast. However, if you take a video of it with a digital camera with a rolling shutter (which most cameras have at the moment) it captures the motion of the string in a wavelike pattern that is proportional to the frequency of the motion of the string; the smaller strings move faster, create a higher pitched sound, and shows up as shorter-wavelength waves. Note: this is not the way the strings actually move, it’s an interesting, and potentially useful optical effect.

Because the optical effect really makes it look like there are a lot of internal waves rolling along the string — which there are not — I’d be quite cautious about using this in physics class. However, if a student wanted to go into the detail to understand how it works — and then explain it to the class, they can start with the math about standing waves in instrument strings and the relationship between sound pitch and wave motion, and a visual explanation of the rolling shutter effect:

What Happens When Two Black Holes Collide?

A student asked this question about black holes during a discussion, and I didn’t have a good answer. Now there’s this:

A study last year found unusually high levels of the isotope carbon-14 in ancient rings of Japanese cedar trees and a corresponding spike in beryllium-10 in Antarctic ice.

The readings were traced back to a point in AD 774 or 775, suggesting that during that period the Earth was hit by an intense burst of radiation, but researchers were initially unable to determine its cause.

Now a separate team of astronomers have suggested it could have been due to the collision of two compact stellar remnants such as black holes, neutron stars or white dwarfs.

— via The Weather Channel (2013): Black Hole Collision May Have Irradiated Earth in 8th Century.

From the original article:

While long [Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs)] are caused by the core collapse of a very massive star, short GRBs are explained by the merger of two compact objects … [such as] a neutron star with either a black hole becoming a more massive black hole, or with another neutron star becoming either a relatively massive stable neutron star or otherwise a black hole.

— Hambaryan and Neuhäuser (2013): A Galactic short gamma-ray burst as cause for the ¹⁴C peak in AD 774/5 in

More info via The Telegraph, and the original article discussing the spike in carbon-14 in tree rings is here.

Improvisational War

Nic6143070 — Rebel catapult. Image by Tauseef Mustafa.

Fighting against a well armed military, the rebels in Syria have had to do a lot of improvisation. A basic knowledge of physics and chemistry has proven somewhat useful.

The Atlantic has a collection of photos of DIY (do it yourself) weapons, that includes catapults and sling-shots.

piccolomini-battle-grenade — A rebel carries his home-made grenade. Youssef, 28 year old FSA fighter says: “my home made grenades, I am the only one in our Katiba able to build them, the guys like me for that, thats why I always carry them, for me and my comrades, its my mark and I want to leave one.”. Image by Sabastiano Piccolomini.

Sebastiano Tomada Piccolomini has a fascinating photo-essay in the New Republic showing the one item that members of one group of rebels considered as their most crucial weapon. These range from a radio, to a packet of cigarettes, to improvised grenades.

Finally, one of my students discovered that a cell phone and power-source from a computer can be made to look an awful lot like and improvised explosive device.

We are living in the future, but sometimes I wonder if it’s where we want to be.

electronics-improvised_4776 — Simulated IED.

Albedo and Absorption

creek-leaves-ice-3169 — Ice melts around an embedded leaf, taking the pattern of the leaf.

Darker colored objects absorb more light than lighter colored objects. Darker objects reflect less light; they have a lower albedo. So a deep brown leaf embedded in the ice will absorb more heat than the clear ice around it, warming up the leaf and melting the ice in contact with it. The result, is melting ice with shape and pattern of the leaf. It’s rather neat.

Creek 3D

Cloudy ice on the creek after our February snowstorm.

The History of Pharmaceutical Penicillin

For ten years after discovering penicillin, Fleming and his contemporaries could not get the penicillium mold to grow fast enough for mass production. Finally, in 1942, scientists isolated a strain of the mold from a piece of moldy cantaloupe in a garbage can.

Penicilliummandarijntjes — Penicillium mold on mandarin oranges. Image by Wikimedia User:Bios.

Gravel Bar in the Creek

gravel-bar-1 — A wavelike bar of loose gravel in the creek.

In addition to clearing out the leaves, the fast flow in the creek created some interesting fluvial features. Example number one is this curious gravel bar that was not there a week ago. The gravel is quite coarse — 2-4 cm in diameter — but it’s extremely loose, which is typically of recently deposited sediment.

It seems likely that the sediment comes from beneath the fallen tree that cuts across the creek just upstream of the gravel bar. The tree restricts the stream flow, forcing the water to speed up, and when the water found it’s way through by cutting under the tree, it had enough energy to excavate a hole under the tree and deposit the resulting sediment just a meter or so away.

It’s a neat piece of fluvial geomorphology.