Physics

Photo caption: This is a streetcar in New Orleans traveling back towards The Quarter on St. Charles Ave. I held the camera against the window sill, making sure to divide the image equally between the inside and the outside. Shot with a Nikon D700 at .8 sec @ f/20, ISO 400, Nikkor 18.0-35.0mm f/3.4-4.5 lens set at 23mm. This photo was submitted to National Geographic's 2012 Photo Contest (Places). Photographer Don Chamblee is 53 years old, and has enjoyed cameras all his life, but he didn't start to get serious until college. Now, at 53 years old, he takes photos professionally and works in stock and fine art photos. You can read more about Don at his website.

"The activity will help give students a kinesthetic feel for the inertia concept. This lab is a great way to provide students with an experience that can be very thoroughly discussed and analyzed."

Hydrogen fuel cell cars, whose only tailpipe emission is water, are often hailed as one solution to our energy woes. But many hurdles remain, including lowering the cells' cost, building filling stations, and finding green ways to produce hydrogen. Meantime, our NOVA scienceNOW host test-drives a prototype fuel cell car, with "Car Talk" hosts Tom and Ray Magliozzi along for an amusing ride.

a game that is based on time dilation and relativity

"A Slower Speed of Light is a first-person game prototype in which players navigate a 3D space while picking up orbs that reduce the speed of light in increments. Custom-built, open-source relativistic graphics code allows the speed of light in the game to approach the player's own maximum walking speed. Visual effects of special relativity gradually become apparent to the player, increasing the challenge of gameplay. These effects, rendered in realtime to vertex accuracy, include the Doppler effect (red- and blue-shifting of visible light, and the shifting of infrared and ultraviolet light into the visible spectrum); the searchlight effect (increased brightness in the direction of travel); time dilation (differences in the perceived passage of time from the player and the outside world); Lorentz transformation (warping of space at near-light speeds); and the runtime effect (the ability to see objects as they were in the past, due to the travel time of light). Players can choose to share their mastery and experience of the game through Twitter. A Slower Speed of Light combines accessible gameplay and a fantasy setting with theoretical and computational physics research to deliver an engaging and pedagogically rich experience."

"Science Appreciation: Introduction to Science Literacy"