I’ve got another long lab this afternoon, so I’m stealing an idea for an audience-participation thread from James Nicoll: Name five things we didn’t know in the year that you were born that make the universe a richer place to think about. This is actually a really interesting exercise for showing how rapidly the world… Continue reading Dorky Poll: Science In Your Lifetime
Category: In the News
Cold Fusion Never Dies
Weird ideas never die, they just go underground, and return with new names. “Cold Fusion” is now “Low Energy Nuclear Reactions,” and was the subject of a day-long symposium at the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society. It’s not clear how much credence to give this. It can’t be entirely kookery, because this was… Continue reading Cold Fusion Never Dies
Cold Fusion and Congress
The case of Purdue’s Rusi Taleyarkhan, cleared by the university of charges of misconduct in a murky process, has taken another turn. Congress is getting involved, with the Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee of the House Science and Technology Committee requesting more details from the university. On the one hand, I’m not enthusiastic about Congress getting… Continue reading Cold Fusion and Congress
Rocket Science Is Hard
The latest news in the private space flight game is, well, let’s call it mixed: The second test flight of the privately-built Falcon 1 rocket failed to reach its intended orbit late Tuesday, nearly one year to the day of the booster’s ill-fated spaceflight debut. The two-stage Falcon 1 rocket shot spaceward [image] from its… Continue reading Rocket Science Is Hard
The Life Cycle of a Microwave Photon
After a short post-March Meeting lag, Physics World is back to announcing really cool physics results, this time highlighting a paper in Nature (subscription required) by a French group who have observed the birth and death of photons in a cavity. I’m not sure how it is that the French came to dominate quantum optics,… Continue reading The Life Cycle of a Microwave Photon
Dark Aliens in the Times
A good weekend for science in the Sunday New York Times, with a nice magazine article about dark matter and dark energy, and also a piece about the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), inexplicably located in the Book Review section (the article, that is, not the aliens). It’s probably possible to draw some sort of… Continue reading Dark Aliens in the Times
Extrasolar Planetary Atmospheres
The only reason I’m not going to hunt and kill James Nicoll for pointing me at the Conservapedia thing is that he also provides a link to the latest results from the Spitzer telescope. Not the one that Kate’s former boss uses to keep an eye on the New York State Legislature, but the one… Continue reading Extrasolar Planetary Atmospheres
Journal of “Well, Duh!”
This one came across the RSS feeds last week, when I was getting ready to leave town and didn’t have time to post, but I really can’t let this slide by without comment. The EurekAlert headling really says it all: Sleep disturbances affect classroom performance: As a night of bad sleep can have an adverse… Continue reading Journal of “Well, Duh!”
The Definitive Statement on Marcus Ross
As usual, Scott Aaronson says it better than I did: [M]ost of the commentary strikes me as missing a key point: that to give a degree to a bozo like this, provided he indeed did the work, can only reflect credit on the scientific enterprise. Will Ross now hit the creationist lecture circuit, trumpeting his… Continue reading The Definitive Statement on Marcus Ross
New Particles and Epicycles
PhysicsWeb has a story about a new theory of axions that claims to resolve some discrepancies between past experiments. Two previous experiments looking for axions– hypothetical weakly interacting particles that might be an explanation for dark matter– have found conflicting results: the CAST experiment looking for axions produced in the Sun found nothing, while the… Continue reading New Particles and Epicycles