It’s that time again: Mythbusters is back! And they sure know how to kick things off with a bang — or better yet, a prolonged burn!

For the 10th anniversary of the show, the Mythbusters revisited the very first myth they ever tested, the JATO rocket car. Wikipedia has the story in what appears to be its most common form:

The Arizona Highway Patrol came upon a pile of smoldering metal embedded into the side of a cliff rising above the road at the apex of a curve. the wreckage resembled the site of an airplane crash, but it was a car. The type of car was unidentifiable at the scene. The lab finally figured out what it was and what had happened.

It seems that a guy had somehow gotten hold of a JATO unit (Jet Assisted Take Off - actually a solid fuel rocket) that is used to give heavy military transport planes an extra ‘push’ for taking off from short airfields. He had driven his Chevy Impala out into the desert and found a long, straight stretch of road. Then he attached the JATO unit to his car, jumped in, got up some speed and fired off the …

In the 22,000 Foot Fall episode of Mythbusters, Adam did a calculation of how long it should take for a falling person to reach terminal speed. It occurred to me that there’s a wrong (but simple) way and a right (but complicated) way to do this calculation — I wonder which one was used on the show to come up with 487 feet?

First, the simple way. From numerous tests in previous episodes, the Mythbusters know that the terminal speed of a person falling through air is about 120 miles per hour. Based on that, you could try to figure out the fall height it takes to achieve that speed using the formula

(It’ll become clear later on why I’m calling the height \(h_0\)). This formula comes from the kinematic equation \(v^2 = v_0^2 + 2ad\) with initial velocity \(v_0 = 0\), final velocity \(v = v_T = \unit{120}{\mileperhour}\), and acceleration \(a = g = \unit{9.8}{\frac{\meter}{\second^2}}\). Plugging in the numbers and calculating gives

That’s reasonably close to what Adam got on the show, so I’m guessing this is the method …

On the last episode before breaking for Christmas, the Mythbusters build team undertook the slightly ambitious project of skipping a car across a pond, as shown in the movie Cannonball Run. At first this probably seems like a ridiculous thing to try — of course, on Mythbusters, what isn’t? But this one actually worked. Here’s a look at the rather interesting physics behind it.

As Jesse explained on the show, there are basically two physical principles that allow you to skip a stone (or a car) across water: the spin, and the reaction force of the water. This isn’t buoyant force, like they’ve dealt with on previous shows; if buoyancy alone were the only thing pushing up on the stone, it’d float. Stones don’t float. (Neither do cars.) The force that keeps a stone skipping across the water is related to its speed. Spin and speed, that’s the magic formula.

First, the spin. Any spinning or rotating object has angular momentum, which is like a rotational equivalent of linear momentum: roughly speaking, it measures how difficult it is to change the object’s motion. Objects with a lot of momentum are either very massive …

Hot on the heels of their Bullet Fired vs. Bullet Dropped episode, the Mythbusters have another result that’s poised to shake up the world of science… well, maybe not. But this week’s main myth, Dirty vs. Clean Car, is the kind of neat idea that most of us would never think to test and yet turns out to be surprisingly close to practicality. The myth that Adam and Jamie are testing is that dirt on a car has the same kind of effect as golf ball dimples, increasing the fuel efficiency of the car. To sum up the results (SPOILER ALERT ;-), it doesn’t work, at least not with dirt — but putting an actual dimpled coating on a car does increase the fuel efficiency by 11%. (Only on Mythbusters would they dimple a car…)

As with a lot of recent myths, this one deals with fluid dynamics — but not just the simple stuff like drag force, as in the bullet myths. The golf ball effect is based on turbulence, specifically the idea that the rough surface of the ball induces turbulence which disrupts the wake (pocket of still air) that trails behind the ball. That pocket of still …

This week the Mythbusters tackled the question of whether you can make a bullet follow a curved flight path, as in the movie Wanted. The characters in the movie are able to do this using some fancy flick of the wrist as they fire the gun, but is it really possible? Apparently a lot of people were wondering.

The short, simple answer is no. It’s an obvious application of Newton’s first law of motion: objects moving in a straight line will continue moving in a straight line at constant speed, unless subject to an external force. But there are only a couple of external forces that can act on a bullet: air resistance and gravity. Gravity certainly isn’t going to make the bullet curve sideways as we see in the movie, and all air resistance will do is slow it down, not change its direction.

Then again, Kari, Grant, and Tory hit on an important point: bullets are highly symmetric and are typically ejected from the gun barrel with high spin. All this is optimized for motion in a straight line toward whatever you’re aiming the gun at. What happens if you use asymmetric, oddly shaped …