{"id":807,"date":"2004-01-06T04:29:49","date_gmt":"2004-01-06T04:29:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/?p=807"},"modified":"2011-05-01T18:33:27","modified_gmt":"2011-05-01T23:33:27","slug":"geometry-the-science-of-skipping-stones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/?p=807","title":{"rendered":"geometry: the science of skipping stones"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">A cool, calm lake. Your dog frolicking along the  beach. Your significant other admiring your attempt to skip a stone  across the water &#8212; and, to your deep embarrassment, it plops straight  down with nary a bounce. Has this ever happened to you? Thanks to a new  study, you need never suffer the humiliation of inadequate  stone-skipping again. Christophe Clanet from the University of  Aix-Marseille in France and his colleagues report in the Jan. 1 <em>Nature<\/em> that they have discovered the secret of maximizing the number of bounces  in a skipped stone: you need to keep an angle of about 20 degrees  between the spinning stone and the water&#8217;s surface. To obtain that magic  number, the researchers built a stone-skipping machine that fired  aluminum discs into a tank of water. Using high-speed video cameras,  Clanet and his team monitored the discs as they hit the water at various  angles, velocities, and spins, focusing on the &#8220;crucial moment&#8221; of the  bounce. Though the speed and rotation of the object are important, the  physicists found that the angle of collision between the object and the  water was critical to obtaining the largest number of bounces. In fact,  no rebound was possible if the angle was greater than 45 degrees. So,  the next time you want to impress your partner with your stone-skipping  prowess, bring a protractor. <\/span><\/p>\n<h6><em>This news brief appeared in the Discoveries column of the <\/em>Boston Globe&#8217;s<em> Health\/Science section on 1\/06\/2004.<\/em><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A cool, calm lake. Your dog frolicking along the beach. Your significant other admiring your attempt to skip a stone across the water &#8212; and, to your deep embarrassment, it plops straight down with nary a bounce. Has this ever &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/?p=807\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-boston-globe-3","category-news-briefs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=807"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1092,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807\/revisions\/1092"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}