Web Watch

To suggest topics or sites for Web Watch, please visit http://www.physicstoday.org/suggestwebwatch.html . Compiled and edited by Charles Day

http://fonetika.nytud.hu/kempelen/

By 1791, Farkas Kempelen had perfected one of the most remarkable instruments of the 18th century: a mechanical device for reproducing the sounds of human speech. More than two centuries later, Gábor Olaszy and Péter Nikléczy followed Kempelen’s design and replicated his device. To learn more about the project, watch In memoriam Kempelen Farkas, a flash animation created by Olaszy’s graduate student Tamás Bohm.

http://planetary.org/programs/projects/stardustathome/

Before it returned to Earth in January, NASA’s Stardust spacecraft trawled interplanetary space for tiny dust grains. The modest catch is stuck invisibly to the wispy filaments of the detector medium, an aerogel. For the first step in gathering the grains, scientists at Berkeley’s Space Sciences Lab have filmed the aerogel with micron resolution. The second step involves the computer-owning public. Visit Stardust@home to download a screensaver that sifts through the 700 000 or so movie clips one by one to locate the precious cargo.

http://www.npl.uiuc.edu/~a-nathan/pob

On his website The Physics of Baseball , Alan Nathan has collected more than 30 articles and audio and video clips concerning the science of America’s venerable sport. Among the items in Nathan’s compilation is Hit Tracker, which calculates how far from home plate a home run would have landed if it could reach the ground unimpeded.