What Happens When Water Freezes in a Box So Strong It Can’t Expand?
Some readers may recall a science class in which an excitable teacher walked to the front of the class to show off a small, cracked steel container, seemingly damaged by an incredibly powerful, but tiny force; only for said teacher to reveal that the damage had been done by nothing more than water. However, what…
The Science of Why Your Pasta Boils Over
We’ve all done it: you put the pasta on to boil, turn your back for a few minutes to wipe off the counter or read the newest Today I Found Out article, and suddenly you hear that foreboding hissing sound of water boiling over. (Perhaps if you simply subscribed to our Daily Knowledge podcast and…
The Physics Behind Why Sausages Split Lengthwise
I like sausages. I like grilled sausages. I like fried sausages. I like beef, pork and chicken sausages. I even like vegetarian sausages. Sometimes when you cook sausages, they burst. This occasionally happens if you try and cook them too fast. It can also happen if the brand of sausage you are cooking is overly…
Robins Can Actually See Magnetic Fields (But Only in One Eye)
Despite its unassuming looks and gentle temperament, the humble red breasted robin (Erithacus rubecula) boasts a superhero-like ability. They can see magnetic fields, giving them an almost perfect sense of direction. Just to be clear, we don’t mean that a robin can sense the Earth’s magnetic field or something like that as many other birds…
How Gravity Would Be Different If the World Were a Cube
Perhaps the main difference if the earth were a cube would be that students would become much more frustrated trying to calculate the gravitational field. For a uniform cube with side length L and density rho, the gravitational force on mass m at position (x,y,z) is given by with where alpha, beta, and gamma are…
Why Cold Weather Makes Your Water Pipes Burst
We’re currently experiencing colder-than-seasonal weather here in Seattle. This is causing a lot of problems with burst water pipes. Here is a picture of a couple of issues suffered by a friend of mine Ian. Why Do Pipes Burst the Way They Do? Why do water pipes burst, and why do they always fail the…
There’s a Naturally Occurring Nuclear Fission Reactor in West Africa
In May 1972 in a uranium enrichment plant in France, scientists examining ore from a mine in Gabon, West Africa, discovered that a natural nuclear reactor had spontaneously manifested in that region in the Earth’s primordial past, churning out approximately 100 Kw worth of energy continuously for a few hundred thousand years about 1.7 billion…