Now on ScienceBlogs: Eta Carinae's 21-Year Outburst: A Cosmic Instant Replay!
Eta Carinae's 21-Year Outburst: A Cosmic Instant Replay! "Not explaining science seems to me perverse. When you're in love, you want to tell the world." -Carl Sagan Nothing lasts forever in this Universe, not even the seemingly timeless stars in the sky. At any moment, any one of...
Most Difficult Course? Regular reader Johan Larson sends in a good question about academic physics: You have written about teaching various courses in modern physics, a subject that has a fearsome reputation among students for skull-busting difficulty. That suggests a broader question: what...
Interview with a Physicist At age 28, theoretical physicist Dr. Zohar Komargodski became head of a research group in the Institute's Particle Physics and Astrophysics Department. A recent paper, published with Prof. Adam Schwimmer of the Physics of Complex Systems Department, made some...
Faint Young Sun The standard solar model predicts a young Sun which was too faint to sustain liquid water on the Earth, unless there was an extreme greenhouse effect at the time, which seems to contradict the geochemical record. It seems to...
How The Universe Destroys Its "Death Stars" "What's that star? It's the Death Star. What does it do? It does Death. It does Death, buddy. Get out of my way!" -Eddie Izzard Like it was for many people, the original, very first Star Wars movie was one...
Coercive Logic Here's a logic puzzle for you: Suppose I offer you a million dollars, in return for which you agree to answer a certain yes/no question. You can answer either truthfully or falsely as you desire. That's it. Should you accept...
Oldest Human-Made Object in Space Prior to the launch of Curiosity, the oldest human-made object in space was the 1958 Vanguard 1 satellite. Now it is a coin!
Another Week of GW News, February 12, 2012 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup...
Must Read for astronomers: Discovery and Depth "...the current situation calls for bold leadership and tough decisions and not merely the proverbial rearrangement of the chairs in the dining hall of the Costa Concordia as it approached the Isola del Giglio."14...
Charles Darwin, Geologist We know that Darwin was a biologist, and in many ways he was the first prominent modern biologist. But many people do not realize that he was also a geologist. Really, he was mainly a geologist on the day he stepped foot on The Beagle...
An Experiment in Teaching Writing: A Look Inside the Sausage Factory As I've said a bazillion times already this term, I'm teaching a class that is about research and writing, with a big final paper due at the end of the term. Because iterative feedback is key to learning to write,...
How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog Photoshop Contest Results So, the big How to Teach Physics to Your Dog Photoshop contest concluded on Friday. We got five really good entries, and the judges (me and Kate) had a hard time reaching a decision. After long deliberation, though, we've come...
The Galaxy's Biggest Valentine "What's in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet." -William Shakespeare Up in the night sky, just a few degrees away from Orion, one of the most identifiable constellations in the...
Upcoming Appearances: Boskone I've been falling down a little in the area of shameless self-promotion, but I will be at Boskone this coming weekend, where I'll be doing three program items: Reading: Chad Orzel (Reading), Fri 19:30 - 20:00 This will be a...
Technology Review Magazine Poised to Return as Festival Sponsor! Known as "the authority on the future of technology " and the world's oldest technology magazine,Technology Review - published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - is bringing its prestige and expertise back to the Festival as a Media Partner!
Weekend Diversion: Interactive Scale of the Universe "The human world stands about midway between the infinitesimal and the immense. The size of our planet is near the geometric mean of the size of the known universe and the size of the atom. The mass of a human...
The Festival Recognizes Our First "Featured Fan"! The 2012 Festival is will be here this April and we thought it would be special to honor some of the people that make the Festival happen: our fans. The Festival would not be possible without the help of our partners, sponsors and exhibitors; however our fans play a huge impact in the success of the Festival.
Ominous signs for NASA There are several signs o'doom for NASA bubbling up out there...
Random Note That Wouldn't Bother Normal People In a book that I read recently (either The Cloud Roads or The Serpent Sea-- I finished the first and immediately started the second), as some characters are traveling from one place to another, there's a passing mention that they...
Hey, America! Break out the Binoculars after Sunset and see Uranus tonight! "The phenomena of nature, especially those that fall under the inspection of the astronomer, are to be viewed, not only with the usual attention to facts as they occur, but with the eye of reason and experience." -William Herschel We...
Why did Phobos-Grunt fail? The Russian probe destine for the Mars system never made it out of Earth Orbit and recently crashed back into Planet Earth. Why did the rocket ship fail? There has apparently been a lot of obfuscation of what caused this disaster, but now there is...
The Big Bang for Beginners "It took less than an hour to make the atoms, a few hundred million years to make the stars and planets, but five billion years to make man!" -George Gamow Let's pretend that, for all of our history on Earth,...
Breatkthrough at Lake Vostok Rumors have been in the air for days, but we now think it confirmed that Russian Scientsts have penetrated the liquid part of Antarctica's Lake Vostok. The lake has been frozen over for something like 20 million years. Certainly there was life in it at...
Melting Ice and Sea Level Rise If all the water currently trapped in all the glaciers across the entire world melted, the sea level would rise far more than most people imagine. Almost everyone living anywhere in the world at an elevation of below about 500 feet with a direct drainage...
Course Report: A Brief History of Timekeeping 04 Through a weird quirk of scheduling, I haven't actually taught the intro modern physics course since I started writing pop-science books about modern physics. So, this week has been the first chance I've really had to use material I generated...
“That's why helium recycling is important. If I don't recycle my aluminum can, the problem isn't that we lose the aluminum from the earth, it's just that it will take more energy to get those atoms back into a useful form than if I recycled it. If I don't recycle my helium (and my guess is most users don't), the atoms eventually leave the planet.” Anonymous Coward on Why is Helium so Scarce?
PZ Myers 02.02.2012
Jason Rosenhouse 02.12.2012
Tim Lambert 02.01.2012
Orac 05.18.2011
Orac 01.26.2012
Latest science stories | More at nytimes.com
Some engineers use cranes and steel to make their designs reality, but synthetic biologists engineer using tools on a different scale: DNA and the other molecular components of living cells. Synthetic biology uses cellular systems and structures to produce artificial models based on natural order. Read these posts from the ScienceBlogs archives for more:
Pharyngula May 30, 2007
The Loom January 31, 2008
Discovering Biology in a Digital World July 2, 2006