If the 2008 Large Hadron Collider rap didn’t appeal to your musical sensibilities, you might try two science songs now making the internets rounds.

The first isn’t really new at all: Joe Sabia has employed Google Instant for a pastiche based on Tom Lehrer’s 1959 Elements Song, which in turn parodied Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1879 Major General’s Song.

[via Boing Boing]

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Sure, when blood hits the water, sharks know exactly where to go. But how do they hunt for less-obvious meals? New research says they use math.

How exactly the sharks move seems to vary with how much food is around.

Imagine yourself in a Walgreens, picking up a few necessities on your way home from work. You might make short movements, darting between aisles, crossing and recrossing your path as you debate between generic and name-brand. Apparently, sharks do the same thing when they have a lot of food in one area. Scientists even suggest their pattern is Brownian, no more intelligent than the aimless sway of microscopic particles buffeted by water molecules.

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Since the crush of press stories about Tiger Woods is more or less inescapable, you’ve probably heard about his little auto accident (and many of the less savory details). But if you take a close look at this photo released by the police, you’ll notice something besides the mess of debris—the book that the world’s great golfer has been reading. It’s Get a Grip on Physics by John Gribbin.

While the accident and the tawdry personal accusations that resulted therefrom could damage Woods’ reputation permanently, it provided nothing short of a bonanza for author Gribbin, since Americans want to do whatever celebrities are doing. From The Independent:

“This is one of my older and lesser known books – a guide to new physics for non-scientists. I can only guess that Tiger has been interested in the various stories about the Large Hadron Collider, and wanted to learn more. Several of my books have been doing better than usual this year,” Dr Gribbin said yesterday.

The book was 2,268th position on the Amazon sales list, up from 396,224th the previous day.

Though Tiger was tight-lipped about the circumstances of the wreck, Gribbin has to be on to something here. Woods was probably so distracted thinking about the awesomeness of physics that he couldn’t concentrate on driving.

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Image: Florida Highway Patrol

To honor the start of a new school year, we bring to you the following Fermi problem: How long would a physics lecture have to be to actually kill you?

Or more precisely, from Physics Buzz:

Assuming you’re not in a big lecture hall and the professor shuts the door at the start of class, how long does it take for you and your classmates to deplete the oxygen enough to feel it?

The mathletes at the Buzz make a few assumptions about the classroom, but in a 16-foot by 16-foot classroom with a 10-foot ceiling, packed with 34 bleary-eyed students and one Red Bull fueled professor the answer is…2 hours and 51 minutes!

Of course you’ll probably be brain dead long before that point.

Check their math here and then tell us why they’re right or wrong, or if you’ve ever survied such a physics marathon.

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Image: flickr / Rober S. Donovan

Scientist hoping to prove the existence of dark matter are bringing their search deeper underground, thanks to a lab that at certain points will reach nearly 8,000 feet below South Dakota’s Black Hills.

The laboratory is being constructed beneath an old goldmine, which itself was once the site of renowned physics research. The fact that it’s sheltered from cosmic rays makes it a great potential locale for the mysterious dark matter particles, which may make up a quarter of the universe’s mass and do not “feel” the electromagnetic forces that affect ordinary matter. According to the AP:

The research team will try to catch the ghostly particles in a 300-kilogram tank of liquid xenon, a cold substance that is three times heavier than water. If they tried to detect dark matter above ground, the highly sensitive detector would be bombarded by cosmic radiation.
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The next time you’re interested in a healthy dose of physics (with a generous splash of literature), resist the temptation of your Wikipedia bookmark, take a step back from the harried, irreverent blogosphere, and dive into the enrapturing prose of pre-Soviet Russia.

In 1913, Yakov Perelman wrote an enchanting book called Physics for Entertainment, and it’s just what Jules Verne and H.G. Wells would have turned out—had they any desire to teach the fundamental laws of the universe. Perelman’s book was only recently translated to English, and seeks (successfully) to “arouse the activity of scientific imagination, to teach the reader to think in the spirit of the science of physics…with all that he normally comes into contact with.”

In chapters like “How to Work Miracles,” “Mathematics and Imagination,” and “Fairy Tale Railway,” Perelman associates the laws of physics with an ample variety of both everyday phenomena (knots, eggshells, fire, jumping from a moving vehicle) and the wildest fantasies of H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Cyrano de Bergerac, Gogol, Mark Twain, Voltaire, Pushkin, and Edgar Allan Poe. Blending flowery prose with equations, neither of which are burdensome, he weaves his own delightful narrative with the imaginations of a great writer, producing a highly engaging piece of educational literature.

Some excerpts, illustrating Perelman’s merging of science fiction with physics non-fiction: (more…)