Kotaku: Physics

Angry Birds, Happy Physicists

Brian Crecente — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 14:00:00 EDT

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Galileo discovered the language of nature. Einstein questioned the color of rainbows. Today's physicists ponder the vertical acceleration and horizontal velocity of an angry bird in flight. More »

Learn Physics The Angry Birds Way

Brian Crecente — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 18:20:00 EDT

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I'm a bit of a physics hobbyist. That doesn't mean that I understand or can even converse in the language of motion, but I love reading about it. More »

Light-Absorbing Anti-Lasers Could One Day Rule Your Computer

Mike Fahey — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 14:00:00 EST

Scientists at Yale University have created the world's first anti-laser, a device in which two beams of light clash together, ultimately cancelling each other out. How could such a device change the way we do our computing? More »

These Are Some Of The Guys Who Made Red Dead Look So Good

Luke Plunkett — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 02:30:00 EST

Half the visual appeal of Red Dead Redemption is in the landscapes. Those were done by Rockstar. But the other half is John Marston's swagger, or the way a bandit gets caught in his horse's stirrups. More »

And Now We're Trapping Antimatter Atoms

Mike Fahey — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 14:30:00 EST

Antimatter and matter annihilate each other on contact, so how do you go about capturing atoms of antihydrogen for study? The brilliant minds at the CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva have figured it out. More »

A Space-Time Cloak Is Much More Exciting Than An Invisibility Cloak

Mike Fahey — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 14:30:00 EST

Do you find the idea of an honest-to-goodness cloak of invisibility intriguing? How about a cloak that obscures events in space-time? Science is making it happen. More »

Convert Information into Energy, Just Add Demon

Mike Fahey — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 14:30:00 EST

Researchers in Tokyo have taken a physics law-breaking thought experiment from an 18th century Scottish theoretical physicist and made it a reality, converting energy into information using Maxwell's Demon. More »

Science Takes One Step Closer To Rendering Us Invisible

Mike Fahey — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 14:30:00 EDT

Invisibility cloaks; stealth armor; invisible jets - a team of physicists at Scotland's University of St Andrews have made a breakthrough that could make these items a reality. More »

The Laws Of Physics May Vary By Jurisdiction

Mike Fahey — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 20:30:00 EDT

The laws of physics describe basic behaviors of nature that are, to our knowledge, universally constant. According to a new study conducted by astrophysicists based in Australia and England, these universal constants might not be as universal as we thought. More »

Real Scientist Examines the Science Fiction of Mass Effect

Owen Good — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 21:30:00 EDT

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Cloaking devices? Oh yeah, we can totally do that. Telekinesis? Suuure! In this video, Real Actual Scientist-mans Dr. Michio Kaku, speaking more like a futurist and less like a physicist, tackles the plausibility of what you see in Mass Effect. More »

So, the Haystacks of Assassin's Creed II - Are They Any Bigger?

Owen Good — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:00:00 EST

Doesn't look like Ubisoft learned their physics lesson. Matt M., who helped the Kotaku Bureau of Weights & Measures calculate the cushion Altair would need in reality, thinks the haystacks are bigger in ACII. They still look puny to me. More »

Kotaku Bureau of Weights & Measures Studies Fallout, Physics, Also Beer

Owen Good — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 13:00:00 EDT

About a year ago, you may recall, my brother and I attempted to derive the product of Pac-Man's metabolic functions. In that spirit, Kotaku has now created its own Bureau of Weights & Measures. More »

Fight Night 4 Is Realistically Slimy

Mike Fahey — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 14:00:00 EDT

The new physics engine for EA's Fight Night Round 4 brings you closer than ever to the true experience of having your head sliding against a large sweaty man's armpit. More »

Sunday Timewaster: Dropping the Ball

Owen Good — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 14:00:00 EDT

Physics games are like National Geographic maps. I could stare at them for hours and feel like I learned something even if I couldn't articulate what I had been doing all this time. More »

OLPC Physics Game Jam

Stuart Houghton — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 19:20:00 EDT

On the weekend of August 29-31, teams of game developers will join the OLPC Physics Game Jam in a race to create a unique physics-based game for the One Laptop Per Child XO Laptop. More »

NaturalMotion Teams With Nvidia

Mike Fahey — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 17:30:00 EDT

Game developers and publishers should have no trouble at all creating realistic worlds and populating them with realistic people as NaturalMotion and NVIDIA announce a partnership that pairs the former's morpheme animation engine with the latter's PhysX technology in one powerful force of realistically moving goodness. More »

A Half-Life 2 Mod and a History of Video Game Physics

Maggie Greene — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 15:30:00 EDT

My undergraduate thesis was long, kinda boring, and involved dead imperialists; two students at McMaster University have created a Half-Life 2 mod called Half-Life Havoc for theirs, and attached a little paper on the history of video game physics. More »

'Phun': A 2D Physics Playground

Maggie Greene — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 18:30:34 EST

Not precisely a game, but there has been talk lately of physics (and science in general) in games, and this is a neat little program that's fun to spend a while playing with. It's still in beta and has the requisite bugs you might expect, but here's what the creator has to say about it: More »

Science Is Fun! Half-Life, Portal, and Science

Maggie Greene — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 16:30:48 EST

All hail the Enlightenment — Thomas Freeman has an interesting look at science and attitudes towards science in Half-Life and Portal. What do such attitudes spell for future releases? More »

Crysis Physics Porn

Michael McWhertor — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 18:40:00 EST

Havok Licensed to Blizzard

egauger — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 17:40:30 EDT

In a press release that went out yesterday, only to be instantly smothered in a sea of Wii, Havok announced that Blizzard Entertainment has licensed the physics engine for god knows what. More »

Burnout 5 On Real Physics: Meh

Brian Ashcraft — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 07:22:18 EDT

1Up sends word that in the October issue of Official PlayStation Magazine, Alex Ward, Burnout 5's game design director, says that coolness is numero uno. He states: More »

New Indy Trailer Full of Gently Waving, Seagoing Invertebrates

egauger — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 23:20:05 EDT

New Indy 2007 footage from LucasArts, in a faux German WW2 propaganda-flavored shell that calls to mind the flippant and endearing flavor of the old adventure games. If they can preserve that feeling while imbuing it with fistfights and car chases, I'm going to be extremely pleased. Computer and Video games, where I got this clip, says: More »

Endorphin the Precursor to Euphoria

egauger — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 22:20:00 EDT

If you read my last update you'll know that things are a little unstable at the office today, so I did my best to check and see if we'd already posted this (sorta old) little movie demonstrating the post-ragdoll physics being used in the new Indiana Jones game. And I don't think we have. Be sure to write outraged e-mails to the tips address if I'm wrong, 'kay? More »

Mammarial Musing: Boobs as Driving Force in Games Development

egauger — Thu, 25 May 2006 15:53:31 EDT

Club Skill has an excellent retrospective on the role of breasts in the history of video games. The article is crammed with illustrative screenshots and amusing factoids; apparently, Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 is the first game to have each breast assigned its own set of physics. Someone's been researching long into the night. More »

Phyics: The Next Gaming Frontier?

kotaku.com — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 20:40:00 EDT

GamersFirst has an interesting essay on what may be the next big revolution in gaming: physics. The article unfairly singles out Oblivion, essentially criticizing it for not having come out five years from now, but it makes a good point that what they call "casual physics" is a largely unexplored area of the game experience. More »

Robo Blitz: The Next Big Arcade Hit?

Brian Crecente — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 07:00:12 EST

I ran into the Naked Sky Entertainment team on the expo floor at the Game Developers Conference last week. They seem to really enjoy what they do and what they do, at least right now, is work on a cool game for the Xbox 360 Live Arcade and computer. More »

NVidia and Havok Demonstrate Physics GPU

brownlee — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 09:40:21 EST

We all know that video games are never going to be respected amongst the tea-and-crumpets set as a high art form until we have games that can realistically emulate a disembodied Double-D breast rolling through a Katamari Damacy type world, or the bone-cracking tumbling that would result if you kicked an old woman down a set of polygonal stairs. More »