News Feature: The perplexing physics of oil dispersants

To understand intra-specific interactions in populations, scientists measure the spatial arrangement of species individuals. This geographic arrangement is known as the species distribution or dispersion. Highly territorial species exhibit a uniform distribution pattern, in which individuals are spaced at relatively equal distances from one another. Species that are highly tied to particular resources, such as food or shelter, tend to concentrate around those resources, and thus exhibit a...

The characteristics that enable us to distinguish one substance from another are called properties.

Physics is concerned with the interactions of energy, matter, space, and time, in order to discover the underlying mechanisms that underpin all phenomena. The word "physics" comes from the Greek word "phúsis", which means nature. Physics seeks to comprehend the natural world around us at its most fundamental level. It emphasizes the use of quantitative laws to do this, which could be valuable in other fields that want to push the performance boundaries of present...

Problem-solving is the ability to apply general physical principles to specific situations, usually expressed by equations. It is an essential skill in physics, and can also be useful for applying physics in everyday life as well. Analytical skills and problem-solving abilities can be applied to new situations, compared to a list of facts, which can never be extensive enough to include every possible circumstance. To solve physics problems, a certain amount of creativity and insight is...

When a rigid body is hanging freely from a fixed pivot point and is displaced, it oscillates similar to a simple pendulum and is known as a physical pendulum. The period and angular frequency of a physical pendulum are obtained by using the small-angle approximation and drawing parallels with a spring-mass system. The small-angle approximation (sinθ=θ) is valid up to about 14°.
When dealing with complicated systems, the mass moment of inertia is an important parameter, as it...

Solutions of Gases in Liquids
As for any solution, the solubility of a gas in a liquid is affected by the attractive intermolecular forces between solute and solvent species. Unlike solid and liquid solutes, however, there is no solute-solute intermolecular attraction to overcome when a gaseous solute dissolves in a liquid solvent since the atoms or molecules comprising a gas are far separated and experience negligible interactions. Consequently, solute-solvent interactions are the sole...