Back in 1999, Neal Stephenson's novel Cryptonomicon introduced me to the idea of Van Eck phreaking—intercepting the weak electromagnetic radiation from a computer monitor to recreate what the person is seeing on the screen. Now security researchers have come up with an exploit that uses an even simpler form of radiation: heat.
News reports say that 11 of the 12 game balls used by the New England Patriots in their AFC championship game against the Indianapolis Colts were deflated, showing about 2 pounds per square inch (psi) less pressure than the 13 psi required by the rules, so it seems that the most bizarre sports scandal of recent memory is real. But there are still plenty of questions: why would a team deflate footballs? Could there be another explanation? And most importantly, what does physics tell us about all this?
Anna-Louise Reysenbach has been to bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, and Mexico's Sea of Cortez. Sometimes she sits on ships atop the waves while sending robots down to such locales. Other times she goes herself, sealed inside submersibles that bring her safely to hydrothermal vents located more than a mile beneath the surface of the sea.
It’s easy to understand the theoretical minimum temperature: absolute zero. The absolute maximum, on the other hand, is squirrely. “We just don’t know whether we can take energy all the way up to infinity,” says Stephon Alexander, a physicist at Dartmouth University. “But it’s theoretically plausible.”
150,000: the number of weather observations that have been recorded by a 101-year-old farmer, the U.S. National Weather Service's longest-serving volunteer, who has called in temperatures, rainfall and other measurements from his home for 84 years.
