Related papers: How does a drinking straw balance work?
We consider the trick of balancing a vertical stick on a horizontal plate. It is shown that the horizontal stochastic driving of the point of contact can prevent the stick from falling provided that the stochasticity is that of a coloured…
The water bottle flipping challenge consists of spinning a bottle, partially filled with water, and making it land upright. It is quite a striking phenomenon, since at first sight it appears rather improbable that a tall rotating bottle…
We study experimentally the dynamics of a water droplet on a tilted and vertically oscillating rigid fibre. As we vary the frequency and amplitude of the oscillations the droplet transitions between different modes: harmonic pumping,…
In modern power systems, the operating point, at which the demand and supply are balanced, may take different values due to changes in loads and renewable generation levels. Understanding the dynamics of stressed power systems with a range…
The stick-slip phenomenon widely exists in contact mechanics, from the macroscale to the nanoscale. During cholesteric-nematic unwinding by external fields, there is controversy regarding the role of planar surface anchoring, which may…
Presents a minireview of topics concerned with balancing in quiet (bipedal) standing, and balancing of a stick. In the focus is the apparent stochastic nature of the swaying of the human inverted pendulum.
Astronomers generally assume planet-forming disks are aligned with the rotation of their host star. However, recent observations have shown evidence of warping in protoplanetary disks. One can measure the statistical alignment between the…
We study numerically stick slip motions in a model of blocks and springs being pulled slowly. The sliding friction is assumed to change dynamically with a state variable. The transition from steady sliding to stick-slip is subcritical in a…
The dramatic dynamic slowing down associated with the glass transition is considered by many to be related to the existence of a static length scale that grows when temperature decreases. Defining, identifying and measuring such a length is…
We performed an experiment on elementary hydrodynamics. The basic system is a cylindrical bottle from which water flows through a pin-hole located at the bottom of its lateral surface. We measured the speed of the water leaving the…
We measure stability of two-dimensional granular mixtures in a rotating drum and relate grain configurations to stability. For our system, the smaller but smoother grains cluster near the center of the drum, while the larger, rougher grains…
In the paper discusses the interaction between two charged balls in equilibrium state. It is shown that, depending of the sizes, charges and distance, the balls can move in the same or opposite direction. They can repulse and attract. It is…
Weighting methods are widely used to adjust for covariates in observational studies, sample surveys, and regression settings. In this paper, we study a class of recently proposed weighting methods which find the weights of minimum…
The similarity in atomic structure between liquids and glasses has stimulated a long-standing hypothesis that the nature of glasses may be more fluid like, rather than an apparent solid. In principle, the nature of glasses can be…
Single-loop elastic rings can be folded into multi-loop equilibrium configurations. In this paper, the stability of several such multi-loop states which are either circular or straight are investigated analytically and illustrated by…
This paper proposes a novel Gronwall inequality-based method for transient stability assessment for power systems. The challenges of applying such methods to power systems are how to construct the differential inequality and how to treat…
The transition from a flowing to a static state in a granular material is studied using large-scale, 3D particle simulations. Similar to glasses, this transition is manifested in the development of a plateau in the contact normal force…
Living systems break detailed balance at small scales, consuming energy and producing entropy in the environment in order to perform molecular and cellular functions. However, it remains unclear how broken detailed balance manifests at…
We establish the principles for a new generation of simplified and accurate watt balances in which an oscillating magnet generates Faraday's voltage in a stationary coil. A force measuring system and a mechanism providing vertical movements…
The field theory of a short range spin glass with Gaussian random interactions, is considered near the upper critical dimension six. In the glassy phase, replica symmetry breaking is accompanied with massless Goldstone modes, generated by…