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Seen and heard

Physics World March 2021

Physics World

 
Quanta Physics World  March 2021

Seen and heard

Weird and wonderful stories from the world of physics

(Courtesy: Barratt London)

Lunar living

The housing market might be a bit sluggish with lockdown in full swing, but that hasn’t stopped housing developer Barratt London teaming up with the British Interplanetary Society to create a prototype home for future astronauts on the Moon. Consisting of two floors with a 2 m-thick roof to protect inhabitants from radiation, the lunar module boasts three bedrooms that are on the lower floor to further reduce the radiation dose. The open-plan upper floor, meanwhile, features a kitchen, dining and living space as well as a gallery that offers the “perfect place” to view the lunar landscape and, “if you’re lucky”, catch Earth in the distance. Barratt says that many amenities in the terraced properties will be available such as electricity, water, Internet and – thankfully – air. The house would be built using resources found on the Moon including basalt bricks, but furnishing it will be “one of the trickiest aspects of living on the Moon” as wood and plastic would have to be flown in from Earth. Connecting each property is also a “street”, which to us looks more like an underground bunker despite the smiley, happy people on the company’s CGI mock-up. Perhaps it should be renamed The Crescent?

A load of Moon balls

If we did eventually ever settle on the Moon, we’d need something to while away those long dark nights…so how about a spot of golf? Alan Shepard, of course, famously hit a couple of golf balls during the Apollo 14 mission in 1971. Despite shanking his first attempt with a makeshift 6-iron, he claimed his second shot went “miles and miles and miles”. Imaging specialist Andy Saunders from the UK has now put Shepard’s boast to the test, but found that the ball travelled barely 37 m. Still, as Saunders point out, 37 m isn’t that bad given that Shepard wasn’t wearing natty golfing trousers and a short-sleeved polo shirt. Instead, he had to hit his balls wearing a tight-fitting spacesuit and swinging his club with one arm. “I would challenge any club golfer to go to their local course and try to hit a six-iron, one-handed, with a one-quarter swing out of an unraked bunker,” Saunders told the BBC. Maybe lunar sports fans will have to stick to a round of crazy golf.

The case of the cubic poo

If there’s one mystery that has longed puzzled biologists, it’s why wombat poo is not round but shaped like a cube? The thinking used to be that cubic faeces are formed during the act of defecation, with the wombats producing this shape to stop the poo from rolling away, thereby helping the animals to communicate (see January 2019 p5). Now, however, physicist David Hu from Georgia Institute of Technology, along with colleagues in the US and Australia, has discovered that wombat poo is cube-shaped thanks to the muscles that line the marsupial’s intestines. They do not have cylindrical symmetry but rather create two stiff and two flexible regions, which means that as the material moves through the intestines, rhythmical muscle contractions sculpt the poo into cubes. The team says its discovery could “have applications in manufacturing, clinical pathology and digestive health”. And where was the research published? Soft Matter (17 475), of course.

 

(Courtesy: USPS)

Stamp of success

The US Postal Service has issued a commemorative stamp honouring the Chinese-American physicist Chien-Shiung Wu. The 1957 Nobel Prize for Physics was shared by Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee “for their penetrating investigation of the so-called parity laws which has led to important discoveries regarding the elementary particles”. However, some physicists argue that Wu should have shared the prize for providing the experimental evidence for Lee and Yang’s theoretical prediction of parity violation. Wu now follows in the footsteps of Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman and Maria Goeppert Mayer with a commemorative stamp. Just a shame it was never a Nobel too.