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Thanks To The Magnus Effect, This Basketball Does Something Pretty Weird When Dropped

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Morenike Adebayo

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1149 Thanks To The Magnus Effect, This Basketball Does Something Pretty Weird When Dropped
Basketball is dropped from a height of 126.5 meters (415 feet). Veritasium/YouTube

Drop a basketball from a height, you've got a few flights of stairs to descend to retrieve it and you might even owe an apology to an angry passer-by.

But if you give it enough height and add a dash of backspin, you can watch it say GOODBYE, FRIEND as it curves a great distance away from its intended flight path.

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This is the Magnus effect, where the descending, spinning basketball drags air around it, forming areas of lower pressure and high pressure, causing it to swerve away.


Veritaserum/YouTube

Check out this video below from Veritasium, where Derek Muller explains more about the fascinating phenomenon.

 

[H/T: io9]


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