Since 1938, every ball in Major League Baseball has been covered in a special “rubbing mud” harvested from a secret location in New Jersey. Although the league has tried in Keep reading
Tag: baseball
Measuring Drag
After a noticeable rise in the prevalence of home runs beginning in 2015, Major League Baseball commissioned a report that found the increase was caused by a small 3% reduction Keep reading
Tokyo 2020: Baseball Aerodynamics
For a long time, people thought baseball aerodynamics were simply a competition between gravity and the Magnus effect caused when a ball is spinning. But the seams of a baseball Keep reading
The Knuckleball
For more than a century, athletes have used the zigzagging path of a knuckleball to confound their opponents. Knuckleballing is best known in baseball but appears also in volleyball, soccer, Keep reading
Fluids Round-up – 11 January 2014
It’s a big fluids round-up today, so let’s get right to it. Over at txchnologist, there’s a great article on controlling combustion instabilities in rocket engines with sound. Quanta Magazine Keep reading
Simulating a Curveball
Spinning an object in motion through a fluid produces a lift force perpendicular to the spin axis. Known as the Magnus effect, this physics is behind the non-intuitive behavior of Keep reading