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Book Chapter
Galàpagos Finches: Famous Beaks
The Galàpagos Islands are a cluster of extremely remote active volcanic islands in the Pacific Ocean. The Islands are home to 13 species of finches. ...
Book Chapter
Humans & Chimps: All in the Family
No one would mistake you for a chimpanzee. As for humans, there is no one like us on Earth, right? Wrong, scientists were surprised to learn from DNA ...
Book Chapter
Whales with knees and toes? Incredible as it seems, whales once walked on legs and lived on land. Millions of years of biological change have erased t...
Book Chapter
A person, place, or thing is what usually sparks those first memorable childhood impressions. Of course, we often do not study our newfound interests ...
Book Chapter
In this chapter, leaving light behind you enter the world of slow-moving mollusks. A snail must get from one corner of a room (dimensions 5 m × 10 m ...
Book Chapter
The September 1991 discovery of a frozen body in the Tirolean Alps revived interest in radiocarbon dating. This chapter is based on this discovery, as...
Book Chapter
The magnetic force is strange and does not exist for neutral particles—only for charged particles, if those particles are moving. The direction of...
Book Chapter
This chapter presents an example of a classic physics problem known as Atwood’s machine. In the lab it serves as a means of achieving a constant ac...
Book Chapter
At the XXIV International Physics Olympiad, held in Williamsburg, Virginia, students from 41 countries spent a day investigating the physics of amus...
Book Chapter
Stop on red, go on green . . .
When you're driving down a road and you see a yellow light, don’t you wonder when the light will turn red? As you drive down the road at a certain s...
Book Chapter
This chapter is based on one of the theoretical problems given at the XXIV International Physics Olympiad. It is an actual application of physics to a...
Book Chapter
How can someone levitate an object? Magicians do it all the time. Can physicists do it as well? The easiest technique is to attach a string to the ob...
Book Chapter
“It’s done with mirrors.” Whether we attend magic shows or ride the “Haunted Mansion,” we are often surprised and pleased by clever manip...
Book Chapter
Supposedly young people are first introduced to waves while attending or watching sports events. These stadium waves can provide some useful insights ...
Book Chapter
The motion of simple pendulums has played an interesting role in physics and technology. The simplest pendulum to study would probably be a compact ma...