Browsing the Journals

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

The January 2017 issue of The Physics Teacher has articles on page 6 about how to construct an acoustic levitation apparatus and on page 8 about what a dolphin would see when it looks up toward the surface of its tank. Page 83 of the February issue uses a cell phone to measure the electromagnetic skin depth of salt water. A brief article on page 236 of the April issue shows that Newton’s third law can be “derived” from the second law by assuming that the mass of a composite system equals the sum of the masses of its component objects. Finally, a fascinating study on page 268 of the May issue explores whether the Hindenburg disaster is mostly due to an explosion of the hydrogen gas in the dirigible or to the flammability of the coating applied to the airship’s fabric.

Page 98 of the February 2017 issue of the American Journal of Physics compares theory and experiment for the weight of an hourglass containing flowing sand. Another article on page 124 of the same issue shows experimentally that for the familiar problem of a ball starting on top of a hemisphere and rolling down it, the ball begins to slip before it loses contact with the surface. An interesting note on page 228 of the March issue proposes using a gyroscope mounted on a boat in a small pool to demonstrate how a gyrocompass works.

Article 035006 in the May 2017 issue of Physics Education quantifies experimentally the force required to pull apart two interleaved books as a function of number of pages and distance of page overlap. Article 025204 in the March 2017 issue of European Journal of Physics catalogs the general motions of a charged particle moving in crossed uniform electric and magnetic fields. Both journals can be found online at http://iopscience.iop.org/journalList.

Interesting articles in the January and February 2017 issues of Resonance include “Endangered Elements of the Periodic Table” and the two-part “How Do Wings Generate Lift?” These articles can be freely accessed at http://www.ias.ac.in/listing/issues/reso.

Atomic weights are not constants of nature for reasons discussed on page 311 of the March 2017 issue of the Journal of Chemical Education. Page 320 of the same issue discusses the first manmade element, technetium, in terms of the nuclear shell model. The journal archives are at http://pubs.acs.org/loi/jceda8.

Article 010110 in Physical Review Physics Education Research at https://journals.aps.org/prper/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.13.010110 investigates the question of whether including diagrams in problem statements on tests improves student performance and learning? The answer is often no.

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.