In the modern and exciting world of particle physics, in which scientists talk of Higgs bosons and supersymmetry, it would be natural for someone to dismiss the common proton as a particle too pedestrian to be interesting. Yet in the centennial year of the announcement of its discovery, studies of the humble nucleus of the hydrogen atom continue…

Fernández-Chapou and colleagues analyzed projectile trajectories and showed an elliptic property hidden in them. For that analysis, they considered projectiles shot from a point with a common value of speed and different angles of projection. Such projectile paths exhibit some interesting characteristics. For example, pairs of projectiles with…

A power supply is needed to maintain the function of a computer, heat is needed to keep food from cooling down, and a force is needed to maintain motion. Those are notions that seem very natural to many people as they are based on everyday experiences. However, when it comes to motion, it is not force that maintains motion but momentum. Students…

In 2018, we celebrated the sesquicentennial birthday of Robert A. Millikan, a Nobel laureate in physics who worked among the greats such as Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein. His name, however, is perhaps not as widely known. He was born in 1868 in Morrison, Illinois, and moved with his family to the small town of Maquoketa, Iowa, at age nine. It was…

The ability to develop and use models to explain phenomena is a key component of the "Next Generation Science Standards", and without examples of what modeling instruction looks like in the reality of classrooms, it will be difficult for us as a field to understand how to move forward in designing curricula that foreground the practice…

A discussion of audio tones in the physics classroom will include mention of their frequency. The frequency of a periodic signal is a well-defined quantity that can readily be measured. A concept related to frequency is that of pitch. Pitch is a perceived quantity that cannot be measured directly and is most important when listeners characterize…

When a ball bounces obliquely on a horizontal surface, the bottom of the ball stretches horizontally and then vibrates backward. The resulting ball spin depends sensitively on the transverse vibration frequency. A simple model is presented to describe the effect, showing how the stored elastic energy can result in additional spin.

This January marked the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire. On Jan. 27, 1967, the interior of NASA's AS-204 command module (CM), occupied by American astronauts Roger Chaffee, Virgil "Gus" Grissom, and Ed White, caught fire during a rehearsal of its scheduled Feb. 21 launch. By the time the ground crew was able to open the hatch, the…

As a boy I spent many hours skipping stones across the surface of the water on the shore of Lake Michigan. The challenge was to get as many skips or as much distance as possible. Zero skips was a bust. One or two skips was disappointing, three or four skips was mediocre, and six or more skips was exhilarating. The angle of the stone with respect…

Physics and chemistry students learn several methods to determine the density of materials. While measuring the mass of materials is usually simple, volume measurements are more complex. For simple shapes the volume may be determined by measuring its geometry; for more complex shapes students often use Archimedes' principle. However, neither of…

According to Newtonian mechanics, the gravitational fields created by bodies with spherical symmetry (such as planets) are non-uniform. This may create the impression to undergraduate physics students that uniform gravitational fields are just an approximation. This is not the case as uniform gravitational fields are created in hollows of…

This article emphasises the importance of creative thought for environmental education through a discussion of the ontologically rich work of Anna Tsing, Timothy Morton and John Peters. The recent turn toward ontology in the humanities and social sciences has consequently led to diverse theories about 'how things are', and some of these concepts…

Learning in a virtual environment has been found to foster students' affective responses, indicating the importance of exploring the factors which affect students' learning when engaged in a virtual game. This study aimed to explore the relationships among students' epistemic curiosity, situational interest, and learning engagement in an…

Biochemistry and molecular biology students are asked to understand and analyze the structures of small molecules and complex three-dimensional (3D) macromolecules. However, most tools to help students learn molecular visualization skills are limited to two-dimensional (2D) images on screens and in textbooks. The virtual reality (VR) App Nanome,…

Museums, long considered institutions of learning, offer a platform for the integration of art with science. In our work shared here, an introductory college-level agriculture science class collaborated with a university art museum. Our goal was to use art objects as a launching point for dialogue within our class, as well as a way that students…