196,084 research outputs found
Good Vibrations : A Workshop on Oscillations and Normal Modes
No full textWe describe some theatrical strategies adopted in a two hour workshop in order to show
some meaningful experiments and the underlying useful ideas to describe a secondary
school path on oscillations, that develops from harmonic motion to normal modes of
oscillations, and makes extensive use of video analysis, data logging, slow motions and
applet simulations. Theatre is an extremely useful tool to stimulate motivation starting from
positive emotions. That is the reason why the theatrical approach to the presentation of
physical themes has been explored by the group “Lo spettacolo della Fisica”
[Spettacolodellafisica 2014] of the Physics Department of University of Milano for the last
ten years [Carpineti et al. 2011; Carpineti et al. 2006] and has been inserted also in the
European FP7 Project TEMI (Teaching Enquiry with Mysteries Incorporated) [Temi 2014]
which involves 13 different partners coming from 11 European countries, among which the
Italian (Milan) group. According to the TEMI guidelines, this workshop has a written script
based on emotionally engaging activities of presenting mysteries to be solved while
participants have been involved in nice experiments following the developed path
Il teatro di fisica come primo passo verso l'Inquiry Based Science Education nel progetto europeo TEMI
No full textErratum: Transition from Semiorder to Disorder in the Aggregation of Dense Colloidal Solutions (Physical Review Letters (1993) 71, 4, (656))
No full textAnalysis of behavioural discrimination mechanisms in a contact zone between two metacentric races of the house mouse, Mus musculus domesticus, in central Italy.
No full textFrying an egg to study heat transport: an engaging and didactic experiment
No full textUsing everyday life examples is proven didactically useful for teaching physics, as it presents effective applications of physical laws. Cooking and food, in particular, serve two useful purposes: on one side, they are able to engage students in the study of physics with familiar examples; on the other side, thanks to the wide range of physical phenomena involved, they can help teachers in introducing many new topics and in driving students in the understanding of physics laws. In this paper, we propose an experiment to investigate the cooking process of a fried egg. We show how an egg, a frying pan and a thermal camera can be valuable tools to drive students towards the physical science and how, with a single experiment, it is possible to introduce many different phenomena, from the laws of heat transmission to phase transitions. The experiment can be proposed to high school students as an engaging activity, but it is also a valuable exercise for undergraduate students, as it involves a large amount of non-trivial physics far from a typical textbook approach
"Good Vibrations" : A workshop on oscillations and normal modes
No full textWe describe some theatrical strategies adopted in a two hour workshop in order to show some meaningful experiments and the underlying useful ideas to describe a secondary school path on oscillations, that develops from harmonic motion to normal modes of oscillations, and makes extensive use of video analysis, data logging, slow motions and applet simulations. Theatre is an extremely useful tool to stimulate motivation starting from positive emotions. That is the reason why the theatrical approach to the presentation of physical themes has been explored by the group "Lo spettacolo della Fisica" (http://spettacolo.fisica.unimi.it) of the Physics Department of University of Milano for the last ten years (Carpineti et al., JCOM, 10 (2011) 1; Nuovo Cimento B, 121 (2006) 901) and has been inserted also in the European FP7 Project TEMI (Teaching Enquiry with Mysteries Incorporated, see http://teachingmysteries.eu/en) which involves 13 different partners coming from 11 European countries, among which the Italian (Milan) group. According to the TEMI guidelines, this workshop has a written script based on emotionally engaging activities of presenting mysteries to be solved while participants have been involved in nice experiments following the developed path
Cuocere un uovo per insegnare la fisica - Cooking an egg to teach physics
No full textThe wide range of phenomena involved in food processing can provide
countless ideas for introducing new topics of physics, capturing the interest of
students with everyday examples. We show that studying the cooking of an egg
with a thermal camera can be surprising and instructive and provide non-trivial
examples of heat transmission, thermal properties of materials, and of concepts
such as latent heat and phase transitions. The experiment can be an engaging
activity for high school students, but can also be proposed as an inquiry-based
activity for university students who will have a chance to apply their knowledge
of physics to a real phenomenon
Static light scattering characterisation of microporous membrane filters
No full textSome of the more commonly employed microporous membrane filters have been studied in quasi index matching solvents by means of small-angle static light scattering. We report data obtained from membranes made of esters of cellulose with rated pore size p(s) ranging from 0.1 to μm. The high q behaviour of the scattered intensity follows a power law I(q) ∞ q(-α) where α is either 1.9 or 3.8 depending on the membrane chemical composition. Such values reveal that on a short length scale the filters have a fractal nature. Furthermore, the scattered intensity distribution exhibits a peak at a finite wave vector q(m), like in spinodal decomposition processes (which indicates mass anticorrelation effects), a behaviour similar to that observed in Vycor porous glasses via neutron and X-ray small angle scattering. The peak position moves towards smaller q values when increasing p(s), although the characteristic length A=2π/q(m) is always larger than the pore size and it is not trivially related to it. In particular, for membranes made of mixed- esters of cellulose, A is found to be roughly proportional to p(s) for small pore sizes, while for p(s) > 1.2 μm it increases only slightly with the pore size and eventually tends to saturate. In conclusion, these results indicates that small-angle static light scattering promises to be a very useful technique for characterising microporous membrane filter morphology, and also for quality control
Metastability and supersaturation Limit for lysozyme crystallization
No full textWe investigate the ionic strength and temperature dependence of metastability with respect to crystallization in lysozyme solution. The supersaturation limit c* shows a simple scaling relation with salt concentration and, together with the equilibrium solubility c(sat), approximately factorizes into two terms, respectively accounting for electrostatic and temperature effects. The supersaturation ratio S = c*/c(sat) monotonically increases with the addition of salt. While the dependence of solution properties on the ionic strength is consistent with a recent model by Sear and Warren, temperature effects highlight the importance of hydrophobic contributions
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