Seen and heard
Weird and wonderful stories from the world of physics
Parking theory, part 2
Finding the best place to park your car might be the least of your worries during the current global COVID-19 pandemic. But when life does finally return to normal and you’re searching for that perfect car-park spot, US physicists Paul Krapivsky and Sidney Redner have some advice. Last year they examined whether it’s better to park far from your destination (which should be easy but then require a long walk) or to park nearby (which should be harder but require only a short walk). Their conclusion was that a “prudent” strategy is best, in which you park in the first gap of cars you come across but take the spot nearest to the venue (June 2019 p3). Now the duo have formulated a general rule for this prudent strategy. According to Krapivsky and Redner, drivers who observe a particular rule will have a probability of finding the best spot that can be as high as 25% (arXiv:2003.10603). Trouble is, their calculation depends on every driver observing the rules, which as we know isn’t guaranteed. And it assumes a 1D parking lot, which is the kind of place that only exists in a physicist’s imagination.
Social-media star
Giving a scientific lecture can be so exhausting that it might feel like you’ve spent several rounds in a boxing ring. Those parallels between scientific and sporting performance have now inspired Ciaran Fairman – an Irish medical researcher at Edith Cowan University in Australia – to release an amusing video interview, in which an off-screen reporter questions Fairman about his talk as if he’s an exhausted professional footballer who’s just finished a gruelling 90 minutes on the pitch. But rather than being asked about a debateable off-side decision, he’s invited, among other things, to critique the unfortunate colour scheme of a senior colleague’s slides. Fairman also released another “post-match” video, this time with him being interviewed following the peer-review process for a paper his group submitted to a journal. “You’re going to have to reference their work, there’s really no point in arguing with them,” he says when asked about the comments from a “certain referee”. Another post-match coronavirus lockdown video is surely on the cards.
All together now
Physicists in Russia have solved a long-standing mystery surrounding a 230-year-old oil painting. The Portrait of FP Makerovsky in a Masquerade Costume was painted by Dmitry Levitsky in 1789 and shows Makerovsky as a child. It appears to have been done in three sections, but art historians weren’t sure if all three had been painted by Levitsky or had been later additions. Using infrared and Raman spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy, energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy and other physics-based techniques, a team from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, the Kurnakov Institute of General and Inorganic Chemistry and the Tretyakov Gallery has now found the answer. It turns out the entire work was indeed done by Levitsky after all. Well, that’s one less thing to worry about.
Lettuce alone
It’s easy to take lettuce for granted. You can grow it in your garden and, COVID-19 notwithstanding, pop down to your local supermarket to pick any variety you fancy. But up in space, fresh lettuce would be a much-appreciated addition to the usual packaged stodge, especially as lettuce leaves contain more vitamins than prepared fare. Now, a team led by NASA’s Christina Khodadad has studied red romaine lettuces grown on the International Space Station (ISS). There had been health-and-safety concerns over “space lettuce” because it’s grown in lower gravity and is subject to more intense radiation than found here on Earth. However, Khodadad’s team, one of whom just happens to be called Matthew Romeyn, found that space lettuce is free from disease-causing microbes and is as nutritious as plants grown on Earth. ISS astronauts did, though, nibble on some leaves before they were tested, suggesting that they weren’t actually that bothered in the first place.