The furious forces of those angry birds.

• Position: What's New? - 'Angry Birds Furious Forces! The Physics at Play in the World's Most Popular Game' - Book review

Whether they realize it, Angry Birds aficionados are experimenting with physics every time they pull back the slingshot. Each bird launched, each tower hit, and every single piggy popped moves according to the laws of physics: potential and kinetic energy, gravity, inertia, and more. National Geographic Books and Rovio, creator of the Angry Birds app, have teamed up on a new paperback book that brings to light not only the physics at work in the game but in the world around us.

In ANGRY BIRDS FURIOUS FORCES! The Physics at Play in the World's Most Popular Game ($13.95), Rhett Allain--associate professor of physics at Southeastern Louisiana University and blogger at Wired Science Blogs--uses everyone's favorite game characters and a dose of humor to illuminate the basic ideas behind physical science.

The book is divided into five chapters, each exploring the interesting and increasingly challenging concepts of physical science--mechanics, sound and light, thermodynamics, electricity, magnetism, particle physics, and beyond. From the simplest ideas of force and motion to the complex notions of relativity and dark matter, Allain adeptly explains physics in a way that all readers can understand. The book serves as an entertaining and instructional tool for anyone interested in physics--and it may provide insight into how a better understanding of the subject can help conquer that next level of Angry Birds, too.

Each chapter includes "Physics at Play" sections, which include experiments that readers easily can do at home to gain hands-on experience with physics concepts: launch Angry Birds at varying angles to explore gravity and projectile motion; scrape a steel nail along one end of a magnet to create a compass, or use a balloon to simulate our expanding universe. Scattered throughout, "Physi-Facts" offer nuggets of physics knowledge: for example, the pound often is used as a unit of mass, but it actually is a unit of force, and the speed of sound changes with air...