Over in the right-hand sidebar, Seed is pushing a short piece on Laurie Pycroft, a 16-year-old Briton who founded Pro-Test, an organization supporting animal testing. This was all over the UK papers a couple of months ago, and a little Googling turns up a piece by Pycroft himself telling the story of the group’s origins. […]
Category: In the News
The Scores Are Falling?
The science story of the day is probably the Department of Education Report on science test scores, cited in this morning’s New York Times. They administered a test to fourth, eight, and twelfth-graders nationwide, aking basic science questions, and compared the scores to similar tests given in 1996 and 2000. (Update: John Lynch has some […]
Science of the Times
A couple of good science stories in today’s New York Times: First, an article on the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). The current news hook, weirdly, appears to be a recent calculation of the expected magnitude of the signal resulting from the collision and merger of two black holes. Why this merits a long article, […]
Rawr!
I retain just enough of my childhood fascination with dinosaurs to be interested in a headline like “A Meat Eater Bigger Than T. Rex Is Unearthed”. Of course, most of the information you would really want is right there in the headline: New dinosaur species, really big, carnivorous, next story please. Subsequent years of scientific […]
Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off
The Kuiper Belt Controversy continues, with the lastest round showing up in the Times today: Planet Discovered Last Year, Thought to Be Larger Than Pluto, Proves Roughly the Same Size: The object — still unnamed more than a year after its discovery but tagged with the temporary designation 2003 UB313 and nicknamed Xena by the […]
Speaking of Science Education
On a note related to the previous entry, Inside Higher Ed had a longer story about Carl Wieman leaving Colorado for Canada (following in the footsteps of his post-docs?), another guy putting his money where his mouth is: First, he contributed $250,000 of his Nobel Prize award to the Physics Education Technology Fund supporting classroom […]
Story Is a Force of Nature
There’s a nice profile of Randy Olson, the biologist-turned filmmaker behind A Flock of Dodos, which takes a hard look at both sides of the creationism wars: The biologist, Randy Olson, accepts that there is no credible scientific challenge to the theory of evolution as an explanation for the diversity and complexity of life on […]
Really Expensive Mothballs
There’s a little squib in the New York Times today about the return of the Dawn mission to visit a couple of asteroids, one of their little not-quite-a-full-story things in the “Week in Review” section of the print edition (we get the Sunday Times delivered, because I find it much more civilized to spend a […]
Commiseration or Schadenfreude?
In the New York Times newsfeed this morning, we have: First Rocket Is Lost by Space Company A private venture hailed as the beginning of a new age of cheap and reliable access to space suffered a setback yesterday when its first rocket was lost over the Pacific Ocean about a minute after liftoff. The […]
Gravitomagnetic Noise
A reader emails to ask if I can make sense of this announcement from the European Space Agency: Scientists funded by the European Space Agency have measured the gravitational equivalent of a magnetic field for the first time in a laboratory. Under certain special conditions the effect is much larger than expected from general relativity […]