1.  VCE Physics Revision Lecture, Sunday, 15th September, On-line and at Swinburne University of Technology
This year's Revision Lecture will be held on Sunday, 15th September from 10:00am until 2:50pm.
It will be offered as a hybrid event, on-line and in person at the Hawthorn campus.
The presenter will be Colin Hopkins.  The on-line chat room will have experienced teachers available to answer questions.
Lunch will be provided by Swinburne University for the students.
Swinburne University will also provide campus tours and their Astro tour at lunchtime. These can be booked at Registration.
The cost is $27.50 inc GST and participants will get access to revision material.
Students can book at this webpage on the Students of the Vicphysics website, where there is additional information.

2.  Resources of the PD on SACs
Over the last two Wednesdays, two online sessions were held on SACs for the Unit 3 Areas of Study and Unit 4 AoS 1 and in all the four formats: Explaining, Analysing, Applying and Comparing.  Material for and from the PD has been uploaded to PD on SACs in June webpage .
The material includes:

• Questions for the groups on the Motion in 2D and Fields Areas of Study which participants had already done and questions on Electricity Generation and Unit 4 AoS 1 which most participants were yet to do or design.
• A short Powerpoint (5 slides) on the key pointers for each format,
• Spreadsheet of Performance Descriptors for the Area of Study and the skills of Communication, Data Analysis and Arguments and Conclusions, along with information on constructing a rubric for an assessment task from the worksheets in the spreadsheet.
• Check lists for each format. Vicphysics has prepared these to assist teachers in thinking of the aspects of each type of assessment task.  The check lists are not intended to be exhaustive, nor authoritative, but more a guide to the aspects worth considering when designing an assessment task or evaluating commercial tasks or those of other teachers.

Contributed SACs.  For the PD, participants were invited to contribute an assessment task which were placed on a google drive with exclusive access to participants before and during the PD.  There were over 30 SACs on the google drive.
The plan now is to ask each contributor if they would be happy for their SAC to be available more widely.  This is currently in progress. Once approved each SAC will have

• any school identifiers removed,
• a copyright watermark added, and then 
• uploaded to a google drive to which teachers will need to request access by email, in the same way that Luna Park Solutions are made available.

Currently there are 6 SACs on the google drive along with the material described above.  More will be added this week as files are processed.

To get access to this google drive, please email Vicphysics from a school or education-linked email address.

There were moderators for each of the four formats across the Areas of Study.  Notes from their experience across Units 3 and 4 are being prepared and will be added to the website before the end of term. 3. Marvin and Milo: Cartoons for home experiments for middle school physics
The Institute of Physics (IoP) commissioned a series of cartoons featuring the characters Marvin and Milo. They are enrichment activities for 5 - 14 year olds.  There are 155 in the full collection pdf.  This is the link , it features i) What you need, ii) Instructions and iii) Results and explanations for all 155.
4. Ultra Portable Van De Graff Generator - Fun Fly Stick
This electrostatic toy is getting a lot of use in classrooms.  It sells for between $15 and $20 from many suppliers including science equipment suppliers. There are several videos showing educational uses:

• Rhett Allain
• Priming of fly stick
• Start guide 
• Experiments with fun fly stick, other demos plus more and here as well.

  5. A common misunderstanding about particle-wave duality: An article
This is a link to an article by science journalist, author and former editor of physical sciences at Nature magazine, Philip Ball.  He explores media's use of the phrase and quotes Bohr, Heisenberg and Feynmann on its meaning.
He also describes a recent experiment where researchers 'trap ultracold lithium atoms in an optical lattice: interfering laser beams that create a two-dimensional eggbox array of potential wells, each of which can hold an atom. They image individual atoms by detecting fluorescence from excited atomic states. Confined in a well, an atom’s wavefunction is tightly confined: it looks like a discrete particle'
6. What happens next? A regular column in the IOP's Physics Education Journal
Since 2010, Physics Education has had a regular feature called 'What happens next?', which "is a series of short experiments, easily done with familiar equipment and apparatus. The experiments can be paused at a critical stage to see if what we think might happen really does. Some have outcomes that we may not initially expect, and so test our understanding of the principles we apply. They can stimulate discussion, develop thinking, challenge the mind and provide an entertaining source of amusement".
This link has all the entries, about six a year from 2010 to 2023. There is no index, they are mostly on mechanics, but Light and Heat also feature.  Specific titles include Free fall, Collisions, Bubbles, Springs, Melting ice, Faster than g, Standing waves, etc. 7. Particle accelerator demonstrations
Two designs:

• Van de Graaff Generator, hemispherical salad bowl, alfoil strips and a table tennis ball coated with conducting paint or foil.  Building instructions,  video.  This is a DIY demo.
• Electromagnetic cyclotron.  This is a commercial device, it comes with different numbers of coils from 1 to 6.  It is available from AliExpress, Amazon and other suppliers. They are available for about $50 plus $40 shipping, but can go much higher.  Check this video, 

8. Events for Students

Girls in Physics Breakfast for 2024
Bookings are open and flyers are available.

• Bendigo, 1st August.  Speaker: Dr Nadia Zatsepin, La Trobe University, Topic: Making molecular movies with X-ray lasers.
• Geelong, 15th August.  Speakers:  Prof Bre-Anne Sainsbury, Prof Wendy Timms, Deakin University, Topics: a) The Gentle Art of Breaking Stuff, b) Locking Carbon in the Ground: How, When, Where?

The cost this year is $25 per student inc GST with the first teacher free.  A discount is available.
Please check the website for more details.  Bookings can now be made.

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9. Events for Teachers 

July Lectures in Physics, 6pm, Fridays at University of Melbourne.  Theme: Physics and Sustainable Development.
In this lecture series, we ask what role physics has in meeting the UN’s Sustainable Development goals. Coinciding with the first year of the UN International Decade of Sciences for Sustainable Development, these lectures will explore the intersection between physics and sustainable development: from climate action to affordable and clean energy, education to gender equality and beyond.

• Friday, 28th June: Oceans in Motion: How Oceans Affect Our Changing Climate By Dr. Navid Constantinou, ANU.  Abstract: The ocean’s boundless mystery and ever-changing beauty inspires and seduces artists, poets, and dreamers, becoming an eternal muse for creative expression. Despite this, most of the ocean remains a mystery to scientists. We’ll go together on a journey to appreciate how the ocean’s motion gives rise to mesmerising patterns: a complex network of ocean currents and turbulent eddies that move heat, carbon, and salt all around the globe. We’ll dive in and get an understanding of how the ocean’s complicated and inspiring motions shape and regulate the global climate, revealing the ocean’s role in our changing climate.
• Check the website above for the other lectures in the series and also to book.  Venue: Melbourne School of Design Lecture Theatre

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12.   Physics News from the Web
Items selected from the bulletin of the Institute of Physics (UK).
Each item below includes the introductory paragraphs and a web link to the rest of the article.

a) Simple equation predicts how quickly animals flap their wings
Whales gotta swim, and birds gotta fly – and when they do, they flap their wings and fins at a rate determined by the same simple mathematical expression and coefficient of proportionality. The expression, which relates wingbeat frequency to body mass and wing area, is valid regardless of the animal’s size or flying style, and the physicists who derived it say it matches biological data on insects, bats and flapping robots as well as birds and whales.
This follows work by Australian mathematician Michael Deakin in 1970 on insects.

b) Sun’s magnetic field may have a surprisingly shallow origin
A new mathematical model indicates that the Sun’s magnetic field originates just 20 000 miles below its surface, contradicting previous theories that point to much deeper origins. The model, developed by researchers at Northwestern University in the US and the University of Edinburgh, UK, could help explain the origins of the magnetic field, and might lead to more accurate forecasts for solar storms, which can damage electronics in space and even on the ground if they are powerful enough.

c) Nanostring sensor loses ‘almost no energy’ while vibrating
“It is somewhat like a swing that, once pushed, keeps swinging for almost 100 years because it loses almost no energy through the ropes.”
A new “nanostring” has the highest quality factor ever recorded for a room-temperature mechanical resonator, vibrating for unprecedented periods of time while dissipating hardly any energy. The device, which measures centimetres in length but just nanometres in diameter, could be used to detect ultra-small forces such as gravity. (If a large molecule lands on the device, the frequency changes in a measurable way)
The quality factor of a resonator is the ratio of its initial energy to the energy lost in one radian of oscillation, their value is 6.5 x 10^9.

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