James and the Giant Peach is one of those films people tend to forget about, but it's still hella nostalgic. Some people who didn't forget about James and his peach were a group of physics students from Leicester University, who each poured their time and energies into taking apart a well loved classic (who doesn't love doing that?). Everybody's favourite adopted uncle, Roald Dahl, claimed that it would take 501 seagulls to transport the eponymous giant peach across the atlantic. This struck those canny students as woefully naive (*smug science snort*) given that the the peach was "as tall and wide, in fact, as a small house". According to the students' calculations, they estimated that a peach of those dimensions would require 4,890,579 newtons of force to lift it into the air. As the average seagull is able to provide a net lift of around two newtons of lift, that would add up to nearly 2.5 million seagulls. That's a lot of bird poop. Does science make you tingle in your special place? Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter for plenty more.Want to write for WhatCulture Science? Click here to find out how you could get paid to write about what you love.
