All posts tagged: Mechanics

Bite mechanics of ancient marine predators yields surprising results

Bite mechanics of ancient marine predators yields surprising results

Published by Jenni Sidey

The Western Interior Seaway, which existed roughly 80 million years ago, split North America into North and South. It was a warm, shallow sea teeming with life from the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. Fish, squid, and marine reptiles—the lizards that hunted them—inhabited this bountiful marine desert. Some of these predators included large-bodied, or sometimes giant-sized, mosasaurs. These semi-aquatic reptiles re-evolved to live in the ocean, along with long-necked polycotylids. To date, how did so many large predators exist and thrive in the same aquatic space without exhausting their food supply? This has been the focus of an international research collaboration, yet only now is there a comprehensive biomechanical answer based on recent 3D scanning, engineering simulation, and experimentation. The results provide clear evidence of the biomechanical differences between mosasaurs and polycotylids. These distinct physiological configurations represent distinct ecologies and prey types rather than direct competitors. Bite performance of North American mosasaurs and plesiosaurs, showing the bite performance as optimal (bright colors) or suboptimal (darker colors). (CREDIT: Université de Liège / F.Della Giustina) …

Steven Pinker: The mechanics of trust in money and relationships

Steven Pinker: The mechanics of trust in money and relationships

Published by Jenni Sidey

STEVEN PINKER: My name is Steven Pinker. I am a professor of psychology at Harvard University. I am a cognitive scientist and my new book is called “When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows, Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power and Everyday Life. “The Hidden Psychology Behind Common Knowledge.” There is a big, powerful idea floating around linguistics and philosophy and economics and game theory. That’s really a psychological phenomenon. I am a cognitive psychologist. And it drives many phenomena, explains many mysteries, and not enough people know about it. It is the concept called common knowledge. It has a bit of a technical meaning that is not the same as the way we use common knowledge in everyday conversation. We often say, “Well, it’s common knowledge around here that you could bribe the police.” Kind of an open secret. But common knowledge in a technical sense almost means the opposite. Namely, it’s something that not only does everyone know it, but everyone knows that everyone knows it and everyone knows that and everyone knows …

Beyond the Quantum review: A remarkable book on quantum mechanics reveals a really big idea

Beyond the Quantum review: A remarkable book on quantum mechanics reveals a really big idea

Published by skeptic

Pilot-wave theory may act like waves steering bottles on the sea Philip Thurston/Getty Images Beyond the QuantumAntony Valentini, Oxford University Press Physics, it is fair to say, hasn’t gone to plan. After decades of hopeful searching, dark matter still hasn’t been directly detected. We found the Higgs boson, but nothing to pave the way forward. And string theory, that much-touted theory of everything, has yet to yield a clear, testable prediction. Confidence is low. Where do we go from here? In recent years, many physicist-authors of popular science have sidestepped that question. Where once they pointed boldly to the next great discovery, they are now often seen retreating into philosophical reflection or re-explaining what we know already. Not so Antony Valentini at Imperial College London. In Beyond the Quantum: A quest for the origin and hidden meaning of quantum mechanics, he presents something almost antiquated in its rarity: a big idea. As the title suggests, his central target is quantum mechanics, which has underpinned physics for a century. This hinges on the wave function, a …

The Mechanics of Colonialism: Newtonian Metaphors in History

The Mechanics of Colonialism: Newtonian Metaphors in History

Published by Sam Flores

In the late 17th century, Isaac Newton published his “Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy,” laying out three laws of motion that forever changed the way we understand the physical world. In classical physics — the physics of machines — these laws are universal: they describe everything from falling apples to the orbits of satellites. But in the centuries that followed, the language and logic of these laws seeped into political thought. Whether consciously invoked or unconsciously mirrored, Newton’s principles provided a seductive framework for the expansion of empires — and the suppression of resistance — as natural, even inevitable. Newton’s laws landed in a country at relative peace. In England, the relative absence of large natural predators meant communities faced fewer immediate threats to survival. By contrast, in many African regions, the constant presence of predators like lions, hyenas and wild dogs created strong incentives for cooperation and mutual support. Daily survival often depended on coordination, shared knowledge and collective defense, fostering cultures in which collaboration was essential. These societies were by no means uniform; …

Does Quantum Mechanics Help Us Make Sense of the Soul?

Does Quantum Mechanics Help Us Make Sense of the Soul?

Published by Jenni Sidey

The lively Wednesday evening discussion at COSM 2025 between neurosurgeon Michael Egnor and historian of science Michael Shermer was followed by some further comments, including Shermer’s reflections on the possibility of life after death: Here’s Part 1. Michael Shermer: I have a lot of friends on the other side, so I’m thinking if I’m wrong, maybe I’ll get in. Host Jay Richards (grinning): We’ll see. Michael Shermer: You never know. And then they’ll say, well, Christopher Hitchens and Carl Sagan and all those atheist guys, okay? But anyway. So I’m fascinated by all this. I would, like anybody else, for my consciousness to continue beyond my four score and whatever, however long we have. I would, of course. But is it true? I can’t base my judgment of what’s true by what I want to be true. I want to believe what’s actually true. Richards, author of The Human Advantage (2018), told the audience that he has followed Shermer’s work for years so he must hope that it is true too… Michael Egnor offered, What …

Monday Micro Softy 51: A Tale of Two Auto Mechanics

Monday Micro Softy 51: A Tale of Two Auto Mechanics

Published by Jenni Sidey

I recently visited Discount Tires to have my tires rotated. They do it for free. Stepping into the garage, I noticed two mechanics looking under the hood of a Volkswagen. I recognized them from church, though their names escaped me. Courtesy ChatGPT. The older mechanic was tall, with long, unkempt hair, while the younger one was built like a squat fire hydrant with short hair. He had no physical resemblance to the older one. Even so, the squat young mechanic is the biological son of the older mechanic. And yet the older mechanic is not his biological father. Solution to Micro Softy 50: Cutting Through the Cornbread Last Monday, old man Yuri was challenged to divide a rectangular slab of cornbread into eight equal pieces, using just three straight cuts. He succeeded. How did he manage to create eight identical portions with only three cuts? First, the cornbread is a rectangular slab. As shown in Figure 1, any rectangular slab can be cut into eight pieces using three cuts. For the cornbread, the first cut …