High-speed camera captures a fluid behaving like a solid

High-speed cameras are useful for capturing the unseen world, and that includes the occasional example of oddball physics. Researchers have used a camera recording at 1,000 frames per second to spot a fluid behaving like a solid. The team put a liqui...

This Machine Will Probably Never Finish a Full Rotation

When it comes to telling time with an analog clock, the idea of gear reduction is a very critical piece of the puzzle. Basically, a set of multiple gears work in concert to gradually rotate at slower speeds. So a single motor can drive the seconds, minutes, and hour hands on a dial.

But rather than just reducing the speed of a gear a couple of times, engineer Daniel de Bruin decided to make what he says is the “biggest reduction gear in the universe.” Well, it may not be the largest in dimension, but it’s definitely the most complicated, with 100 gears, each gradually reducing the speed from the gear before it.

Each successive gear turns at exactly 1/10th of the speed of its predecessor. The result is a setup that would take literally eons before it would rotate its final gear.

According to the guys at Gizmodo, you’d have to turn the first gear

10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

times to move the last gear to move just one position. Man, that’s a whole lot of zeros, and I definitely can’t count that high.

The machine’s creator explains the rationale behind his build: “Today at 14:52 I will be exactly 1 billion seconds old. To celebrate I build this machine that visualizes the number googol. That’s a 1 with a hundred zeros. A number that’s bigger than the atoms in the known universe. This machine has a gear reduction of 1 to 10 a hundred times. In order to get the last gear to turn once you’ll need to spin the first one a googol amount around. Or better said you’ll need more energy than the entire universe has to do that.”

If you’ve got a full hour to kill you can watch the contraption get through the first few of layers of gears…

[via Gizmodo]

Computer Physics Simulation Can Accurately Mimic Bread Being Pulled Apart

Computer graphics have come a very long way in the past couple of decades, offering up images which are becoming more and more difficult to distinguish from reality. Especially notable are the improvements in physics engines, which allow objects to move and behave more like they do in real life. One of the holy grails of CGI simulation is that of being able to destroy items so they break apart realistically, and now we have the most realistic method yet… to tear apart a piece of digital bread.

Károly Zsolnai-Fehér of Two Minute Papers turned us on to this amazing computer physics tech which is designed to simulate the fractures that occur in an object as it’s torn apart.

In the paper CD-MPM: Continuum Damage Material Point Methods for Dynamic Fracture Animation (PDF), Joshuah Wolper and a team of scientists from the University of Pennsylvania describe a particle-based animation system they’ve developed which can accurately emulate the way that objects fall apart. The technology can be used to simulate everything from the way a piece of bread gradually tears when you pull it, the way that a block of Jell-O breaks into little bits when you drop it, or how a cookie crumbles when you break it apart.

The system also offers a variety of parameters which allow for fine-tuning the behavior of materials, while still retaining a realistic look. The video below explains more about this impressive graphical achievement, and shows off a few examples:

For now, computers aren’t fast enough to handle all of these computations in real time, and the rendering of a single frame can take anywhere from 17 seconds to 10 minutes, but it’s sure to be optimized in the future. Maybe someday we could have a VR game where you’re eating virtual food at your virtual keyboard and leave virtual crumbs between the keys. Or maybe even virtual Cheetos dust, all without leaving a real world mess. Of course virtual food isn’t nearly as tasty or filling as the real deal.

To learn more about this fascinating technology, you can download the paper here. The source code has also been released on GitHub in case you know what to do with it to make it work on your computer.

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