At this year’s Australian Open you’ll see players moving sideways on the Plexicushion surface – which is specially designed to allow players to slide. It’s safer for the players and fun to watch.
To serve at your best, you have to throw your racket in a way that projects the ball at a high speed – but add some spin. It’s simple physics.
from www.shutterstock.com
The speeds at which top players deliver tennis serves are theoretically impossible. So how do they do it? The answer involves Isaac Newton, ping pong and a little bit of ‘cheating’.
It’s hard to imagine life without mobile phones, radio and television. Yet the discovery of the electromagnetic waves that underpin such technologies grew out of an abstract theory that’s 150 years old…
The Large Magellanic Cloud (right) visible in the southern sky is a nearby galaxy to our own.
Flickr/Tracey Harrison Hill
If the solution to a problem does not reveal itself straight away then why not let your initial guesswork evolve? That’s the approach we’ve taken in trying to determine the mass of our galaxy by mapping…
There’s more to gravity than apples falling from trees.
Cea
I have spent almost 40 years trying to detect gravity waves. When I started there were just a few of us working away in university labs. Today 1,000 physicists working with billion-dollar observatories…
Mirrors of a magical scientist: Andromeda photographed through a Newtonian telescope. Flickr/JonBaglo.
The notebooks of Sir Isaac Newton, who was famously reported to have suffered a (scientifically) earth-shaking blow to the head from an apple, are being scanned and published online by the University of…