Fractals determine date of paintings
The physicists scanned a series of Pollock’s artworks into a computer and masked each painting with a series of grids. They then counted the number of squares that contained part of the painted ...
Phase diagram hints at traffic solution
Helbing and co-workers have identified six different traffic phases: homogeneous congestion, oscillatory congestion, triggered stop-and-go traffic, moving localised clusters, pinned localised clusters...
Why cautious people lose
Johnson and colleagues specified “winners and losers” by making the “agents”, as the individuals are called, repeatedly choose between two rooms. Choosing the room denotes a &#...
Solar system is chaotic
Murray and Holman ran numerical simulations of the planets positions over a 200 million year period using their new technique. They discovered that although the outer planets appear in stable orbits, ...
Chaos and the arms race
In the early 1960s Lloyd Richardson had developed a dynamic model to foresee the outbreak of war. He believed that there were three processes that a nation responds to: the external threat (the enemy)...
Computers from chaos
It has been know for sometime that nature follows chaotic patterns that seem to allow organisms to respond to rapid changes in their environment. Sinha and Ditto have taken these equations further to ...
New ways to search the web
Search engines such as Hotbot and AltaVista record a list of pages with keywords in them, but cannot interpret how relevant the information is on the page. For example the word ‘quantum’ r...
The physics of golf clubs
Golf clubs have an intrinsic attraction to physicists. Not only is the game a relaxing sport, but designing the perfect golf club requires the modelling of some very complex interactions. Manufacturer...
