Newton's law of cooling describes an object whose temperature decreases exponentially with time. Because of its many applications, it is a frequent topic of introductory physics labs. In this article, I describe an experiment designed for the freshman year algebra-based physics course that applies this law to answering the question, "Why…

Arduino microcontrollers are becoming increasingly popular in the physics/astronomy community. These devices can provide more in-depth labs on mechanics, electricity and magnetism, light and optics, etc., in addition to programming. These devices can be readily utilized to reach more non-physics/astronomy majors and underrepresented STEM students.…

In the same chapter of his book "Opera Geometrica," Torricelli published two discoveries: 1) initial velocity of a jet from a container increases with the square root of the depth of the hole; 2) he drew the pattern of jets from three openings at the wall of a container filled with water to constant level "H" and determined the…

In a recent submission to "The Physics Teacher," we related how trigonometric identities can be used to find the extremes of several functions in order to solve some standard physics problems that would usually be considered to require calculus. In this work, the functions to be examined are polynomials, which suggests the utilization of…