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Published in Science, 8 Mar 2013

It’s the sort of abstract puzzle that keeps a scientist awake at night: Can you predict how three objects will orbit each other in a repeating pattern? In the 300 years since this “three-body problem” was first recognized, just three families of solutions have been found. Now, two physicists have discovered 13 new families. It’s quite a feat in mathematical physics, and it could conceivably help astrophysicists understand new planetary systems.

The trove of new solutions has researchers jazzed. “I love these things,” says Robert Vanderbei a mathematician at Princeton University who was not involved in the work. He says he, in fact, spent all night thinking about the work. […]

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Published in Science, 10 Aug 2012

Anyone who attended the Bruce Springsteen concert at Ullevi Stadium in Gothenburg, Sweden, in 1985 will recall more than just good vibrations. During the star’s closing numbers, fans rocked the arena so hard that it needed millions of dollars’ worth of repairs. Now, engineers think they can estimate the impact of crowds in such situations—a method that could make stadiums, bridges, and other civil structures far more secure.

The forces of crowds on civil structures—known as crowd-induced loads—are a serious problem for designers. If loads get too high, a structure can visibly deform. Although the risk of collapse is usually small, people can panic and, in the worst cases, stampede. [...]

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Published in Science, 13 Jul 2012

To some, the “drip, drip” of a leaky faucet is a minor irritation; to physicists, it’s a great example of the predictive powers of science. In 1996, theoretical work suggested that, as a water drop hangs from a faucet, its cone-shaped neck should always have the same internal angle at break-off: 36.2°. That was an ambitious prediction given the hugely complex dynamics of dripping water, but it was also very difficult to test with any accuracy. Now, thanks to modern technology, researchers have finally plugged all doubts. [...]

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Published in ScienceNOW, 25 May 2012

It might strike you as an office experiment devised in boredom: piling up staples and seeing how long it takes for them to collapse. But the researchers behind the investigation are serious, and they think it could help explain how “entangled ensembles” benefit the animal kingdom. The team created a mound of staples by pouring them into a cylinder roughly the size of an espresso mug. After removing the cylinder, they subjected the staples to fast, 30-Hertz vibrations on a device technically known as a shaker and measured how long it took for the mound to collapse. [...]

The rest of this article is available here.