Category: Astronomy

When Press Releases Collide

Consecutive entries in my RSS reader yesterday: Salty ocean in the depths of Enceladus Discovery could have implications for the search for extraterrestrial life An enormous plume of water spurts in giant jets from the south pole of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. In a report published in the international science journal Nature today (25 June), European… Continue reading When Press Releases Collide

Unhealthy Obsessions of Academia

Over at Cosmic Variance, Julianne is annoyed at Nature‘s embargo policy. It seems that somebody or another posted a paper to the arxiv while submitting it to Nature, and included a note on the arxiv submission asking people to abide by Nature‘s embargo. So, instead of blogging about the Incredibly Exciting Discovery (which I’d loooove… Continue reading Unhealthy Obsessions of Academia

The End of Planets

We had a colloquium yesterday from Ted von Hippel of Siena College, over on Route 9, about “White Dwarf Debris Disks and the Fate of Planetary Systems.” The abstract was: After a brief introduction to white dwarfs and debris disks, I will present observations from the Spitzer Space Telescope and ground-based telescopes of metal-polluted white… Continue reading The End of Planets

Pop-Science Past: The Collapsing Universe, by Isaac Asimov

Some time back, I was a little surprised to hear James Nicoll use Asimov as a touchstone for science popularizers. I only really knew his fiction, and can’t recall hearing his pop-science books cited by anybody who wasn’t also an SF fan. So, when I ran across one of his science books while we were… Continue reading Pop-Science Past: The Collapsing Universe, by Isaac Asimov

Dead Dinosaurs and Denialism

Yesterday, EurekAlert served up a press release titled New blow for dinosaur-killing asteroid theory, reporting on Gerta Keller of Princeton, who says that the Chicxulub crater isn’t really from the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs. Keller thinks the crater had nothing to do with the extinction event, and claims to have found evidence that… Continue reading Dead Dinosaurs and Denialism

Testing the Fine Structure Constant: The More Things Change, the More They Don’t

Via the arxiv Blog, a review article has been posted by the Haensch group with the title“Testing the Stability of the Fine Structure Constant in the Laboratory.” The fine structure constant, usually referred to by the symbol α is a ratio of fundamental constants– the electron charge squared divded by Planck’s Contant times the speed… Continue reading Testing the Fine Structure Constant: The More Things Change, the More They Don’t

Matter and Interactions and Dark Matter for Kids

New ScienceBlogger and American Gladiator Ethan Siegel of Starts With a Bang has a couple of nice posts about dark matter and how we know it’s there (one, two). These posts reminded me that I never did follow up on the discussion following my post about Magic World Media, who are looking to publish kids’… Continue reading Matter and Interactions and Dark Matter for Kids

Tunguska Explained… Again

The Tuguska event of 1908 is one of the most frequently “explained” events in recent history, trailing only the Kennedy assassination. The arXiv blog reports on the latest explanation of what knocked down all those trees without making a giant crater: Now a new analysis by Edward Drobyshevski of the Russian Academy of Sciences in… Continue reading Tunguska Explained… Again