The week in physics: Mudded baseballs; Passive radiative cooling

Baseball rubbing mud does, in fact, make balls grippier Forward this email View in your browser THE WEEK IN PHYSICS: 11–15 NOVEMBER Advertisement Faster Laser Communication with Steering Mirrors Responding to the higher data transmission rates demand, communication via laser beams, terrestrial, ground-to-satellite, and satellite-to-satellite is opening up new possibilities. Different technologies are available to provide the speed and precision needed to keep laser beams stabilized and pointed in the right direction, making sure they reach their targets exactly, over thousands of miles. Learn more. Baseball rubbing mud does, in fact, make balls grippier Scientific analyses confirm long-held suspicions: Players can throw harder-to-hit pitches when the ball is covered with river sediment. Alex Lopatka Q&A: Hyejin Youn applies statistical physics to human behavior The physicist examines crime, transportation, innovation, and more in the burgeoning field of computational social science. Toni Feder FROM THE VAULT: December 2017 Discovering Earth's radiation belts Six decades after the belts' discovery in 1958, scientists are still finding mysterious features. Daniel N. Baker and Mikhail I. Panasyuk Passive radiative cooling: Not such an off-the-wall idea A growing class of materials can cool horizontal surfaces to below the ambient temperature with no power input. Now there's a material that works on vertical surfaces too. Johanna L. Miller Physics Nobel 2024 in depth Nobel Prize highlights neural networks' physics roots The road to the modern machine-learning marvels was paved with ideas from statistical mechanics and collective phenomena. Johanna L. Miller FROM THE NOVEMBER MAGAZINE NASA urged to boost R&D at expense of near-term missions An independent committee says the space agency must urgently rebalance its budget to invest in people, research, and infrastructure. Lindsay McKenzie Get notified about our webinars and whitepapers Sign up Get Physics Today delivered for just $25 per year Subscribe Accelerating career connections worldwide for over 75 years BROWSE ALL JOBS POST A JOB CREATE JOB ALERTS FEATURED JOBS Tenure-Track Faculty Position in Computational Quantum Sciences and Quantum Information Theory New York University Arts and Science (New York, NY) View Job Senior Computational Physicist Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (Livermore, CA) View Job Postdoctoral Research Associate—Cryogenic Electronics National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (Tallahassee, FL) View Job Assistant Professor in Engineering Physics, Applied Physics, Physics, or Engineering Samford University (Birmingham, AL) View Job Postdoctoral Research Associate—Correlated Quantum Materials Oak Ridge National Laboratory (Oak Ridge, TN) View Job Research Scientist—Materials Research Laboratory University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (Urbana, IL) View Job Physics Today is published by the American Institute of Physics 1 Physics Ellipse, College Park, MD 20740 USA +1 301 209 3100 © 2024 American Institute of Physics. Unsubscribe  |  Email Preferences  |  Privacy Policy  |  Contact Us