Web Watch

Carl Mungan, United States Naval Academy
mungan@usna.edu

The Newton Project at http://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/ is seeking to put online all of Isaac Newton’s writings, whether originally published or not.

Science News online at http://esciencenews.com/topics/physics.chemistry presents popular science articles about physics and chemistry.

All three volumes of the Feynman Lectures on Physics are available to be read freely at http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/.

Brains On is a set of podcasts at https://www.brainson.org/ on science topics for “kids and curious adults.” Another podcast archive is of the one-minute Science Updates produced by AAAS at http://www.scienceupdate.com/.

A Swiss team has recently reported direct observation of hydrogen bonds, as summarized at https://www.sciencealert.com/hydrogen-bonds-have-been-directly-detected-for-the-first-time.

Seismic Illumination is a richly illustrated discussion of Pacific rim earthquakes, online at https://storymaps.esri.com/stories/2017/seismic-illumination/. Similarly, National Geographic has a storyline presentation about the evolution of Mars at https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2016/11/exploring-mars-map-panorama-pictures/. Also see the timeline of space exploration at http://inspacewetrust.org/en/.

“Science says the first word on everything and the last word on nothing.” That quote from Victor Hugo starts the blog at http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/.

A recent report discusses how light behaves in a waveguide that has an effective index of refraction of zero at https://phys.org/news/2017-10-zero-index-waveguide-infinitely-wavelengths.html.

The Pew Research Center analyzes in 10 detailed webpages how most Americans get news about science starting at http://www.journalism.org/2017/09/20/science-news-and-information-today/. You can decide whether the results are cause to sigh or celebrate.

Progress in constructing photonic neural-net processors is reported at https://www.osa-opn.org/home/newsroom/2017/june/doing_neural_nets_with_photons/.

Ken Ford has a collection of essays organized into seven sections on introductory physics topics from one of his books at http://www.basic-physics.com/.

A colleague recently put me onto the wonderful web graphing tool Desmos that lets you easily create and share animated graphs. As a starting point, see the classroom activities at https://teacher.desmos.com/.

Quanta Magazine has a science blog at https://www.quantamagazine.org/abstractions that is worth checking out.

A new article in Physics World re-examines the perennial favorite argument about whether or not hot water freezes faster than cold at http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/indepth/2017/dec/01/when-cold-warms-faster-than-hot.

Disclaimer – The articles and opinion pieces found in this issue of the APS Forum on Education Newsletter are not peer refereed and represent solely the views of the authors and not necessarily the views of the APS.