From Australian Institute of Physics. https://mailchi.mp/scienceinpublic/l96ohyhysb-5121301?e=bb655b284c
With the Nobel Prizes to be announced shortly here is a fun Nobel Physics trivia question for you. Who is the only person to win the Physics Prize twice? When the 2020 Prize is announced we will be staging an online event to celebrate and discuss the science behind it so watch out for that announcement.
As usual the Ig Nobel’s were a stellar list of “achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think.” Congratulations to Swinburne University’s Ivan Maksymov and Andrey Pototsky, a physicist and mathematician, for their award on their work on vibrating worms! “vibrating drunken earthworms with a subwoofer in a garden shed”.
Excitation of Faraday-like body waves in vibrated living earthworms. From https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-65295-4
In other Australian Physics News.
The news about no extra-terrestrial life found comes from the Murchison Widefield Array.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-09/largest-ever-search-finds-no-alien-life/12641722
The research, published in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia this week, observed a patch of sky around the Vela constellation, known to include at least 10 million stars. After 17 hours of observations looking for ‘techno signatures’ — radio emissions that can indicate the presence of an intelligent source — none were found.
(17 hours isn’t long)