University of Leicester Open Journals
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P3 4 How Fast Is Hyperdrive?
Get PDFIn Star Wars: A New Hope, The Millennium Falcon is seen engaging hyperdrive and travelling at superluminal speed, causing the stars in the sky to stretch into long streaks. In this paper, we investigate the speed necessary to see such stretching, and calculate that the Millenium Falcon was travelling at over 1.5 times the speed of light, confirming that the motion was superluminal
Can synthetic blood replacements be produced for vampires?
Get PDFConsistently in media, vampires consume blood, and it is typically from humans. The reason for this varies depending on the lore of the specific media, and depending on what it is that the vampires specifically gain from the blood. Working under the assumption that vampires gain nutrients and molecules rather than life force from blood, this paper explores whether a blood product can be produced entirely synthetically, and whether it could perform the same functions as blood. Current research has developed synthetic serum and partially synthetic red blood cells, but not white blood cells
P3 1 Radiation Exposure in Ecuadorian Banana Factories
No full textPhysics students have known that bananas are radioactive for years, but none have ever considered the plight of the banana packer. In this paper, we investigate the total dose a banana packer would receive over a year of working, and find that the dose is 6.20 μSv of radiation per year, which is less than ingesting a banana a day and thus unlikely to be a concern
P4 7 I'd like to cast thunderwave
No full textWe investigate the amount of sound energy required for a “Thunderwave” spell to move a Kraken as is theoretically possible in Dungeons and Dragons. We find that the huge sound involved would be the similar to a rocket between 165 dB and 175 dB and would rupture the casters’ eardrums
The Appeal of Urgency: Extinction Discourses, Myths and the Private Collectors of Australian Aboriginal Human Remains
Get PDFExtinction presents as a narrative thread in the collecting of Australian Aboriginal human remains in Britain and Australia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Examples of this narrative are in the correspondence, research and the cataloguing methodologies of private individuals and their interaction with collecting institutions. This article focuses on three case studies that present three different private collecting profiles and intellectual environment interactions: Joseph Barnard Davis (1801–1881), Frederic William Lucas (1842–1932), and William Colin MacKenzie (1877–1938). All three have collections held by major collecting institutions in either Australia or England. These separate and diverse individuals are an important conduit to understanding why the application of the extinction narrative was a factor in transforming Australian Aboriginal human remains into prized specimens, sought by private individuals and public collecting institutions
A5_11 Saving Alderaan 2: Momentum Strikes Back
Get PDFThis paper will look into whether the mass of silver required to successfully reflect and absorb the Death Star's (DS's) laser intent on destroying Alderaan, in the PST paper Saving Alderaan: A Star Wars Story, could be accelerated by the DS's laser out of stable orbit and into Alderaan with enough kinetic energy to overcome the previously calculated gravitational binding energy of Alderaan, thus destroying it
P3_9 Modelling Spider-Man’s Swing as an Elastic Pendulum
Get PDFWe investigate an elastic pendulum to see if it could be used to model the trajectory of a particular Spider-Man swing. Our aim is not to find exact parameters, but rather to see if such a swing could be modelled in this way. We find that for reasonable constants (e.g. k ∼ 30 Nm−1 ) and initial velocities ˙r = 5 ms−1 and ˙θ = 1 rads−1 , it might be a useful way to describe this swing
A5_5 Saving Alderaan: A Star Wars Story
Get PDFThis paper looks into whether or not the fictional planet of Alderaan in the Star Wars universe could be saved from the Empire and their Death Star. This is done by looking at reflecting the laser used to destroy Alderaan back at the Death Star. It was found that the mass of a mirror made of Silver required to reflect and absorb the laser's energy was around 227 times more massive than the Earth. It was, thus, deemed unfeasible to undertake such a task and therefore Alderaan could not be saved
P6_2 Mike Drop: Calculating the stretch of rope
Get PDFYoung’s Modulus is used to calculate the stretch of a material based on the force exerted and theinitial length. In this paper, this principal value will be used to calculate the predicted stretchof a sampled dynamic climbing rope due to falls of sequential heights and compare them to theadvertised stretch specification
P2_8 Ciaphas Cain makes a splash
Get PDFIn the novel Ciaphas Cain: The Last Ditch by Sandy Mitchell [1], Ciaphas Cain crashes onto anice world aboard a transport freighter. We calculate that the heat of the hull, as described in thebook, would melt 4.5×1011kgof ice. While this is very large, the ship is too so we believe thisvalue would be accurat