Carl Mungan, United States Naval Academy
mungan@usna.edu

AAPT’s journal The Physics Teacher is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary of publication this year. Check out its anniversary booklet in Flash format.

The entire three-volume set of The Feynman Lectures on Physics have been made freely available in HTML.

A good webpage to explore engineering topics ranging from basic to advanced is the Engineering Exchange.

Do you remember the Macintosh program called HyperCard? It consisted of virtual cards of information and images. Links between different cards would allow one to browse from topic to topic, finding information of interest. The HyperPhysics web pages, each of which look like roughly letter-sized cards, are based on the same idea.

The electric field created in the wake of a laser pulse passing through and separating charges in a plasma can be used to accelerate electrons to high energies over short distances. The University of Texas at Austin recently achieved a record 2 GeV over a span of 1 inch, as you can read about in the Particle Accelerator news article.

A well-written module encouraging the involvement of undergraduates in research experiences is online at the SERC at Carleton College undergraduate research page.

The American Society for Engineering Education has made its flagship journal Prism freely available.

There has rightly been a huge positive buzz about the a capella YouTube video teaching string theory.

NASA has a web site devoted to Earth-observing satellites.

The University of Nebraska at Lincoln has a set of STEM lesson plans (primarily for middle and high school) available.

I was intrigued by the discussion that nanoscale heat engines are fundamentally less efficient than larger devices because of the breakdown of thermodynamics when applied to systems of few particles at the Phys.org news article on quantum engines.

A fun new site for asking and answering unusual pointed questions is the Quora website.

Nowadays there is a lot of interest in metrics on individual journal articles. You can download a handy browser bookmark tool that will instantly look up citation details for any webpage that includes a Digital Object Identifier for an article at The Altmetric Bookmarklet web page.

Looking for good background music in your office? I’m partial to Psychedelic Ambient Trance and to NPR’s Echoes.

The Physics Classroom is intended to support students and teachers of physics, primarily at the high school level, with tutorials, exercises, and other materials.

Disclaimer – The articles and opinion pieces found in this issue of the APS Forum on Education Newsletter are not peer refereed and represent solely the views of the authors and not necessarily the views of the APS.