Inquiring Minds Want To Know

Now you ARE curious!

In spite of Father Eric's best teaching methods, I never really got the hang of physics while I was in high school. I was actually eyeing the cute blonde in the front row: obviously smarter than I was because she was in the front while I languished in the back, hoping to avoid direct questions. I eventually got better at physics and applied many of the principles when I taught bowling, but there are still some things that dumbfound me. Fortunately, there are physicists like Dr. Mark Miodownik to explain those mysteries to me.
Miodownik, a physicist at King's College, London, presented this year's Royal Institution Christmas Lecture (held yearly since 1825), and finally cleared up several questions, including why elephants cannot dance.
On that score, it seems that elephants' legs are so heavy that, despite being able to run at almost 25 m.p.h., they are incapable of graceful movements and sudden turns, both dance movements. In addition, this fact makes it impossible for elephants to jump which completely eliminates them from DWTS. The weight issue also comes up in a couple of more issues. To wit:
Can a hamster survive a fall from an airplane? I know you are as curious as I am about this one. It would seem that anything falling out of an airplane would splat so hard that a spatula would be necessary to remove the carcass from the asphalt. Not so, it seems. Lighter, smaller objects fall with less force than heavier, bigger things. Thus, while falling from an airplane aloft would most certainly be fatal for a human (or an elephant), a hamster would not even feel it when it hit the ground! I still want to try this one out to make sure.
Is an ant stronger than a weightlifter? We all know that, pound for pound, ants are really among the strongest, but how strong are they, really? Apparently, an ant can lift something 100 times its own weight. Olympic weightlifters, on the other hand, can lift weight totaling about twice their own weight. It seems that the ant uses so little strength to support its body that it has a greater reserve to lift other things...something about being heavier equates to being proportionately weaker. As a matter of fact, I've never seen an elephant do a bench press, either.
There is much more to be discovered at this year's lecture, including something called "gecko tape" which might allow us to climb walls and a new carbon fiber that would allow man to put an elevator into outer space!?
Interested in the details? here's the URL:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12069136
We can never know enough physics, it would appear.