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

Cameron Reed estimates the yield of a fission bomb on page 105 of the February 2018 issue of the American Journal of Physics (http://aapt.scitation.org/journal/ajp). An article on page 119 of the same issue compares theory and experiment for fluid sloshing inside a partly filled bottle rolling down a slope, or along the floor and bouncing off a wall. The March 2018 issue has an article on page 169 that explains why a line of color (green if held horizontally) appears diametrically across a CD exposed to white light from the side. Another article on page 206 investigates in detail how a pot-in-pot cooler works. Finally, Dean Pesnell on page 338 of the May 2018 issue considers what the trajectory of a cannonball launched horizontally off a tall mountain would be if the the ball could freely pass through the earth treated as a sphere of uniform mass density.

An article on page 149 of the March 2018 issue of The Physics Teacher (http://aapt.scitation.org/journal/pte) presents data showing that there is a correlation between hours of sleep the night before a final exam and score on that exam. Joe Amato explains how the range of an ICBM can be estimated from its observed maximum altitude on page 210 of the April 2018 issue. The same issue on page 222 discusses a video of the motion of a two-ball Newton’s cradle where the mass ratio of the two balls is 3:1 which can be watched at https://aapt.scitation.org/doi/suppl/10.1119/1.5028235/suppl_file/222_1-mova.mov. Also see if you can deduce the simple rule for the dice game “Petals Around a Rose” discussed on page 262; test your prediction at http://www.borrett.id.au/computing/petals-j.htm. An article on page 317 of the May 2018 issue puts a drone quadcopter in vacuum to determine whether the change in pointing direction is due to conservation of angular momentum or atmospheric drag when the speed of the blades is changed. The iPhysicsLabs column on page 324 of the same issue measures the drag coefficient of a car, bus, fire engine, and cyclist.

Article 024003 in the March 2018 issue of Physics Education rebuts many of the common concerns about nuclear energy. Discussion of cameras and example ideas of slow-time-lapse recordings (over a period of hours or days) for physics analysis is found in articles 035019 and 035030 of the May 2018 issue. A Lagrangian-based model of the pressure and density in a sonoluminescent bubble is presented in article 025807 of the March 2018 issue of the European Journal of Physics. Both journals can be found online starting at http://iopscience.iop.org/journalList.

Deepak Dhar on page 183 of the February 2018 issue of Resonance proposes that mathematics is invented not discovered, and hence a number such as π did not exist thousands of years ago. Also an article on the Maragoni effect in fluid mechanics on page 225 of the same issue has links to wonderful videos of effects driven by surface tension gradients. Another article on fluids with links to lovely videos is on page 491 of the April 2018 issue presenting the behavior of air bubbles in liquids. These articles can be freely accessed at http://www.ias.ac.in/listing/issues/reso.

Cyclic voltammetry is reviewed for beginners on page 197 of the February 2018 issue of the Journal of Chemical Education. An interesting study on page 347 of the March 2018 issue investigates what kinds of textbook illustrations best promote student learning. The journal archives are at http://pubs.acs.org/loi/jceda8.

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.