Living

The opening ceremony of the Olympics is happening right now, kicked off by a giant, colored-smoke flyover by the Royal Air Force's Red Arrows squadron. Pretty cool! Your pounds at work! But does it beat... The Super Bowl? Those RAF boys just dropped thick ropes of red white and blue (no, not that kind) over London's Olympic stadium. The crowd roared. It's fun to watch powerful jets fly over you, especially when they're dropping colored smoke. Everyone loves colored smoke. Everyone, that is, except the audience of the Super Bowl (and plenty of other yankee matches), who are treated to the Cold War thrill of a B-2 stealth bomber cruising overhead, close enough to yank out of the sky, high enough to drop its bellyful of ordnance onto a screaming crowd below. The patriotism is orgiastic. They're both pretty awesome! But as this is the Olympics, and not an English doily swap meet, there must be a winner. So who's your pick? A few things to consider: Cool name—sort ...

Shooting a basketball is one of those things we attribute to years of practice and some ineffable god-given talent. But what if you could become a great, or at least much better, shooter just by learning some mechanical science? Larry Silverberg, a mechanical engineer at North Carolina State University, analyzed "millions of trajectories based on shots by the best free-throw shooters," and he's pinpointed the best method: The magic formula: a launch angle of 52 degrees, three revolutions per second of backspin, and aiming for a spot 7 centimeters (2.8 inches) back from the center of the basket, toward the back of the rim. "With backspin, if the ball hits the rim or backboard, the contact deadens the ball," said Silverberg. "That means it comes off slower, stays closer to the basket and is more likely to fall in." Aiming behind the center of the basket, instead of a dead-on shot, is better because it allows the shooter to miss the mark in either direct...