With the pressure of his peers looking on, Michael Senatore, a senior at Ardrey Kell High School in Charlotte, North Carolina, flipped a third-full Deer Park water bottle through the air, landing it perfectly vertical on a table.

The theatrics, the focus, the precision, and the reaction of the audience help make this seemingly pedestrian feat extraordinary. But what really makes it special is the physics behind the now-famed flip — which are actually pretty complex.

“This is not your average undergraduate physics problem,” Nathaniel Stern, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Northwestern University, said. “It’s much more complicated.”

Stern and I spoke by phone this morning about Senatore’s feat. He explained to me that what separates a typical bottle toss from a perfect landing is just the right amount of water combined with a practiced and thought-through technique.

Angular momentum + fluid dynamics = AMAZING

“The flip,” as it will henceforth be known, all begins with a flick of the wrist, generating a specific force called angular momentum, Stern said.

Angular momentum is very similar to the classical sense of momentum, where an object moving will not change its motion unless acted upon by another force. With angular momentum, the same concept is applied to rotation.

“If you just lob it, that’s not good enough,” Stern said. (At this point, I could hear a water bottle crashing against a table over the phone.) “He releases it from the cap, so that as he tosses it out of his hand the bottle already naturally wants to be spinning. If you toss it from the body, then you’re not imparting that same force that causes it to spin.”

Once Senatore gets the bottle spinning through the air, en route to its final destination, the water inside the bottle then needs to react to that angular momentum.

Liquids are unlike solids in that their molecules are able to move freely and independently from one another. That characteristic leads into another important concept, fluid dynamics — how the water moves inside the bottle.

“This is not your average undergraduate physics problem. It’s much more complicated.”

When the bottle is released, it pushes on the water and starts trying to transfer its angular momentum to the liquid, according to Stern. But the water has more mass than the bottle — and it doesn’t want to rotate because, as a fluid, it can slosh around unevenly the inside of the bottle. So as this angular momentum is transferred to the water, the rate of rotation slows down.

The water bottle will land squarely on the table when the angular rotation slows enough that the water is at the bottom of the bottle and the bottle itself is straight upright. Having that instance play out just before it hits the table takes careful timing and perhaps a little practice.

How to execute "the flip"

According to the Charlotte Observer, Senatore has put a lot of work into perfecting his craft. The 18-year-old said he practices when he gets bored at both school and work.

“All I wanted to do was flip a bottle,” Senatore said humbly.

But little did he know he would inspire many to recreate “the flip.”

Here are some tips to make it happen, according to Stern:

1) “I would find a water bottle and fill it to about a third.”

This is vitally important. Stern says there is a “sweet spot” when it comes to filling up the water bottle. If there is too much water, spinning the bottle will be like spinning any solid object, because there is no room for the water to move around. Too little water means there will not be enough mass to slow down the angular momentum and make the bottle land consistently. Spinning the bottle just a third full allows it to spin easier and allows the water to adjust easier to the angular momentum because it can move around.

2) “Make sure every time you throw, you throw it the same way, so you understand that if you want to change it a little bit, you know what you need to change.”

“Consistency is key,” Stern said. This is a human trick after all, so while a machine may be able to accomplish “the flip” time after time, variations in how humans toss the bottle will greatly impact the result. Tossing the bottle too fast or slightly off axis could result in a fallen water bottle. Staying consistent allows tossers to pinpoint small, specific adjustments.

3) “You have to impart spin.”

Without the spin, the trick is nothing. The spin is essential for landing the bottle upright.

With those keys in mind, give “the flip” a shot. Just remember to make sure the cap is closed tightly.

Watch Vox try "the flip", live on Facebook

Adele, the 28-year-old British pop star, overtook some of the top names in pop music this weekend — Drake, Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber, the Weeknd — taking the Top Artist award at Sunday’s Billboard Music Awards.

Unlike other awards, the Billboard Awards are determined strictly by chart performance, rather than a vote from a guild, for example. And since she made her US chart debut in early 2009 with “Chasing Pavements,” Adele has stayed at or near the top of the music world.

But how long can it last?

To get a better idea of which musicians have had the most staying power, I analyzed the weeks between the top 50 Billboard artists’ first and last “peak” in the Hot 100, with peaks referring to the date a song reached its highest point in the Hot 100.

I found that top artists can survive for upward of two decades — but that staying power varies significantly by genre and time period.

Longevity in the music industry is fleeting, an aspect that impacts artists from different eras and genres differently

The Hot 100 charts are a general measure of a song’s popularity. Starting in 1958, Billboard has published the charts each week, ranking singles on a shifting list of criteria. Right now the list is derived from radio airplay, sales, and streaming data. While not perfect, the Hot 100 gives an adequate picture of the most popular songs at any given moment and has adjusted its criteria over time to account for changes in how Americans listen to music.

So I took the top 50 artists from Billboard’s “Greatest of All Time” list and measured the length of time between their first peaks and most recent peaks to get a rough view of how long they stayed popular.

One thing that became immediately clear combing through the data is how greatly musical lifespans vary by genre. Rappers have the lowest average musical lifespan — 12.24 years — whereas those in R&B and rock tend to stick around much longer.

“In hip-hop, anything that’s more than a couple years old starts to be kind of corny,” says Steven Hyden, author of Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me, a book on the history of pop music rivalries. “There’s an expectation in that genre where you have to do something different all the time. That makes it really exciting, but also makes a lot of artists disposable.”

What that generates is a variety of artists making fewer hits over a shorter length of time.

But with R&B and rock, for example, artists and bands such as Stevie Wonder, Prince, the Rolling Stones, and the Beatles have years of making hits for a large, consistent audience.

Stars from those genres, then, have become more and more entrenched in the ears of the music-listening public, to the point where almost anything they put out is classified as a “hit.”

Producing hits isn’t the only standard of a long, successful music career

Taylor Swift already has more weeks with singles in the Hot 100 than any other artist besides Madonna and Elton John. But a lot of that stems from her ability to release entire albums on streaming services that people use constantly, allowing more of her songs to reach the Hot 100 chart.

Streaming services make it easier for listeners to cycle through entire albums, Hyden said. For instance, Drake, who put out his album Views a matter of weeks ago, has 17 songs in this week’s Hot 100. The album has 20 songs. The same phenomenon applies to Swift whenever she puts out a full-length album.

For Madonna and Elton John, though, the non-hit singles on their albums didn’t receive that streaming boost.

“When people use the word relevant, they mean this person is hip or has some cachet with youth culture,” Hyden said. “If we’re just talking success or popularity, there are lots of bands who do really well on the road that haven’t had hits in decades.”

Specifically, Hyden mentioned the Grateful Dead, a band that produced songs totaling just 43 weeks on Hot 100 charts, yet toured and sold out huge shows from 1965 through 2015.

Even so, producing hits is often the only way bands and artists can stay relevant from a cultural and economic perspective.

Take Billy Joel, who hasn’t produced a Hot 100 single since 1997. Yet he’s touring throughout 2016.

Oftentimes, it’s the hits that keep musicians relevant in the minds of popular culture, even if they were released decades prior.

“The power of a hit song, even if it’s 20 years old, it’s pretty powerful,” Hyden said. “It’s amazing how people hang on to that shit for so long.”

Watch: 11 songs you didn't know were Prince songs

An estimated one in seven Americans faced inadequate or inconsistent access to food at some point in 2014. That figure has held pretty constant since the 2008 financial crisis, according to a Feeding America report released Thursday.

“There’s plenty of food in America,” Feeding America CEO Diana Aviv said. “This is more about a transportation problem, a distribution problem, a political will problem. It’s not about lack of availability.”

Food insecurity — a household-level socioeconomic condition in which access to food can be limited or uncertain — did lower slightly to 15.4 percent nationally in 2014, though it is far from reaching its pre-2008 level of around 11 percent.

Feeding America, the nation’s largest hunger-related nonprofit, measured food insecurity at state, county, and congressional-district levels, providing a localized picture of the challenges facing millions of Americans.

For example, in the county with the lowest food-insecurity rate, Virginia’s Loudon County, just 4.3 percent of individuals are considered food-insecure. To contrast, 37.5 percent of people in Jefferson County, Mississippi, face food-security issues, the highest rate in the nation.

You can view information for your county via Feed America’s interactive map.

Food insecurity is everywhere — but on the rise in big cities

Geographically, food insecurity is present everywhere in the US, but states and counties in the South tend to have the highest rates of food insecurity, the report indicates. Of the counties in the top 10 percent of food insecurity, 90 percent of them are located in the South.

Food-insecurity rates in large urban areas, meanwhile, have increased. In 2013, the food-insecurity rate across metropolitan counties was at 22 percent. In 2014, it climbed to 26 percent.

One of the reasons for this increase could be due to food prices. Metropolitan counties account for 37 percent of all US counties, but make up 54 percent of the 331 highest priced counties for food.

Counties with a high food-insecurity rate have higher unemployment and poverty rates and lower homeownership rates and incomes than the average of all US counties.

People and households struggling with food insecurity face a multitude of unique problems, Aviv said, and food purchases are often the “first thing that goes.”

Food banks are struggling to curb the problem

There’s no silver bullet to fix America’s food-insecurity problem. Feeding America runs more than 200 food banks nationwide, and in her visits to these banks over the last few months, Aviv has seen firsthand the issues that food banks face.

Food banks serve as hubs and storage facilities, portioning out food and distributing it to local communities. These banks and pantries are often only open during work hours and lack proper accessibility for the people who need their services most.

“Our lines [for food] are getting longer and longer. It pushes us not only to provide more food but to ask fundamental questions about how we shorten this line,” Aviv said.

Feeding America is trying to streamline all the functions of food banks and pantries — donation, collection, stocking, access, and distribution — into an organized system so that individuals are better able to receive the food they need, when they need it.

For example, some food banks and pantries have set up offices for people to sign up for government assistance programs while they’re picking up food.

Government assistance programs aren't helping as many people as they could

Many food-insecure Americans aren’t using — or aren’t eligible for — government programs meant to combat hunger.

About a quarter of food-insecure Americans are ineligible for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), better known as food stamps.

Even among those who qualify, participation rates tend to be low. A recent Hamilton Project report finds that about 56 percent of those eligible for food stamps don’t receive the benefits.

In recent years, Congress has also made cuts to these programs.

In March, the House of Representatives’s 2017 budget proposed cutting funding for food stamps by more than 20 percent by 2026.

“It’s not an ephemeral question. It’s not an academic question. It’s a question of people and hungry children who, instead of being hungry for learning, are hungry for food,” Aviv said. “The pressure and urgency makes me feel like we have no time to lose.”