Collaborate Disseminate
Whether you’re a kid or a nerdy adult, you’ll probably agree that the interactive exhibitions at the museum are the best. If you happened to get down to the Oregon …read more Continue reading Interactive Project Teaches Lessons About Electromagnets And Waves
Stand by the shore and watch the waves roll in, and you’ll notice that most come in at roughly the same size. There’s a little variation, but the overwhelming majority …read more Continue reading Rogue Waves Are Mysterious And Big
“These changes have impacts that are felt all over the world.” Continue reading The Oceans Are Getting Stormier
[Ben Gravy] isn’t your average pro surfer. For one thing, he lives in New Jersey instead of someplace like Hawaii or Australia, and for another he became famous not for riding the largest waves but rather for riding the weirdest ones. He’s a novelty wave hunter, but some days even the obscure surf spots aren’t breaking. For that, he decided to build a surfboard that doesn’t need waves.
The surfboard that [Ben] used for this project isn’t typical either. It’s made out of foam without any fiberglass, which makes the board less expensive than a traditional surfboard. The propulsion was …read more
Climate change is changing our wind patterns, which is strengthening waves traveling across the earth’s’ surface. Continue reading Climate Change Is Making Waves Stronger
How does a submarine talk to an airplane? It sounds like a bad joke but it’s actually a difficult engineering challenge.
Traditionally the submarine must surface or get shallow enough to deploy a communication buoy. That communication buoy uses the same type of radio technology as planes. But submarines often rely on acoustic transmissions via hydrophones which is fancy-talk for putting speakers and microphones in the water as transmitters and receivers. This is because water is no friend to radio signals, especially high frequencies. MIT is developing a system which bridges this watery gap and it relies on acoustic transmissions …read more
Continue reading Submarine to Plane: Can You Hear Me Now? The Hydrophone Radar Connection
Wave tanks are cool, but it’s likely you don’t have one sitting on your coffee table at home. They’re more likely something you’ve seen in a documentary about oil tankers or icebergs. That need no longer be the case – you can build yourself a wave generator at home!
This build comes to use from [TVMiller] who started by creating a small tank out of acrylic sheet. Servo-actuated paddles are then placed in the tank to generate the periodic motion in the water. Two servos are controlled by an Arduino, allowing a variety of simple and more complex waves to …read more
When you hear “gravity waves” or “sprites”, you’d think you would know what is being discussed. After all, those ripples in space-time that Einstein predicted would emanate from twin, colliding, black holes were recently observed to much fanfare. And who doesn’t love early 8-bit computer animations? So when we were browsing over at SpaceWeather we were shocked to find that we were wrong twice, in one photo (on the right).
In retrospect, the waves we were thinking of are actually “gravitational waves”. Gravity waves are any waves where gravity provides the restoring force — think ocean waves. But did you …read more
Continue reading Two Words That Don’t Mean What You Think They Do
