At first, the video displays the virtual insides of a crowded passenger airplane. Then all of a sudden, one of the passengers seated in the middle "sneezes." Hundreds of multicolored particles are jettisoned into the air, creating a rainbow-speckled cloud that lingers above everyone’s heads. The cloud dissolves, and the particles disperse, making their way to the unlucky few seated adjacent to the sick passenger.
Want to turn your smartphone into a cosmic ray detector? Well there's an app for that. Cosmic Rays Found in Smartphones, or CRAYFIS, uses smartphones' and tablets' standard camera equipment to detect some of the super-rare particles that shower down on the Earth when a high-energy cosmic ray hits the atmosphere. CRAYFIS collects that data, then sends them onto physicists at the University of California's Irvine and Davis campuses for analysis.
The best way to understand something - such as life - is to build it yourself. That's why, determined to understand the way groups move, a team of New York University physicists set out to create particles that could imitate the way flocks of birds, schools of fish and even colonies of bacteria organize and move together.
