Posts tagged ‘science’
Olympic Medals Awarded for Art from 1912 to 1948
By Chad Upton | Editor
The modern Olympics are all about athletics, but from 1912 to 1948 they also included competitions in art and science.
The main categories were as follows:
- Architecture
- Literature
- Music
- Painting
- Sculpturing
- Statistics
Some of the events included “town planning”, “Epic works” (long poems), “Drawings and water colors”, “Medals”. Yes, medals were given out for creating the best medals. (more…)
Bumblebee Flight is Not Scientifically Impossible
By Terry D. Johnson
The myth that bumblebee flight is scientifically impossible persists today. Even some presidential hopefuls believe it. Don’t be fooled. This tale’s been floating around since the 1930s, back when aerodynamics was emerging from a science.
Various luminaries in the field of fluid dynamics have been accused of popularizing the idea, which seems to have originated in a collaboration between French entomologist Antoine Magnan and his assistant, the mathematician André Sainte-Laguë. Sainte-Laguë had done a primitive calculation on the aerodynamics of bumblebee flight, assuming that the wings we perfectly smooth and flat. They also ignored more complicated aerodynamics in favor of a simpler model.
These assumptions made the calculation easier…and the answer wrong. Magnan himself wrote: “One shouldn’t be surprised that the results of the calculations don’t square with reality.” That didn’t stop the myth from achieving enough lift to take off.
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Image: Wikimedia (gnu)
Broken Secrets 