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

A 2D simulation of the dynamics of simple atoms and molecules at http://physics.weber.edu/schroeder/md/InteractiveMD.html lets users explore phases, pattern emergence, and equipartition.

Check out STEMblog at http://blog.stemconnector.org/. Also see the web page devoted to STEM opportunities for women and minorities at http://www.onlinecolleges.net/for-students/women-and-minorities-stem/.

If you browse College Factual’s list of top 10 colleges for a physics major at http://college.usatoday.com/2015/03/14/top-ten-u-s-colleges-for-a-major-in-physics/, you will see why I am listing it. Also see the blog page and reader comments about choosing an undergraduate college at http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2006/10/16/unsolicited-advice-part-three-choosing-an-undergraduate-school/.

RedOrbit has interesting postings related to science, technology, and health at http://www.redorbit.com/. Another great site is ScienceAlert at http://www.sciencealert.com/.

NOVA Next starts from the conventional textbook ideas of friction and applies them to a handful of atoms in an optical lattice at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/physics/friction/.

Read the Science post at http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/10/machine-produces-largest-humanmade-waves-world about a flume in the Netherlands that produces the largest manmade waves in the world.

A set of K–12 curricula relating science and math to engineering is online at https://www.teachengineering.org/curriculum/browse. Also see the list of simple machines in elevators at http://www.elevators.com/simple-machines-used-in-elevators/.

JPL has a beautiful website devoted to Mars science at http://mars.nasa.gov/msl/.

A short conceptual overview of some of the implications of Maxwell’s equations is at https://www.theguardian.com/science/life-and-physics/2015/nov/22/maxwells-equations-150-years-of-light.

Why does the pitch of a banged mug of hot water change as you stir hot cocoa into it? See http://www.physicscentral.com/experiment/physicsathome/hot-cocoa-effect.cfm. Also read about the physics of champagne at http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/indepth/2015/dec/01/six-secrets-of-champagne.

BBC presents a layman’s webpage on the import of general relativity at http://www.bbc.co.uk/guides/zs7d2p3.

Boston’s Museum of Science has a web presence at http://www.mos.org/museum-online.

The periodic table at http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap160125.html shows the astronomical origin of each element. Also see the TED-Ed periodic table of videos at http://ed.ted.com/periodic-videos.

XKCD has an illuminating (sorry!) discussion of why you cannot start a fire using a magnifying glass to focus the light from a full moon at http://what-if.xkcd.com/145/.

Annenberg has collected together some useful teaching resources about mathematics at http://www.learner.org/resources/discipline-math.html.

A free online page will optimize images for web pages, email transmittal, or disk storage at http://www.imageoptimizer.net/Home.aspx. Another useful resource at http://www.printwhatyoulike.com/ will you let select which parts of a web page to print and which to skip. Finally, the page at https://readability-score.com/ will measure the readability of your writing.

YouTube has a set of videos of nifty science experiments using simple equipment at https://www.youtube.com/user/SteveSpanglerScience.

This Week in Chemistry at http://www.compoundchem.com/category/this-week-in-chemistry/ chooses 5 features per week, many of them of interest to materials physicists.

An ornate website surveying the history of air and space flight is at http://theageofaerospace.com/discovery.

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.