The big physics story of the day is bound to be this new report on American particle physics: The United States should be prepared to spend up to half a billion dollars in the next five years to ensure that a giant particle accelerator now being designed by a worldwide consortium of scientists can be… Continue reading Physics Funding Fundamentalism
Category: Science
Critical Chemical Information
Have you ever wondered about the accuracy of the descriptions in chemical manuals of what different compounds smell like? “Sure,” you say, “the book says that this smells like cheese, but does that really help me in my daily life?” Well, worry no more. Dylan Stiles does the experiment so you don’t have to. (If… Continue reading Critical Chemical Information
Uncertain Pop Quiz
Imagine that you are doing a physics lab to measure the velocity of a small projectile. After making a bunch of measurements to four significant figures, and doing a bunch of arithmetic, you get a value of 4.371928645 m/s. After yet more gruelling math, you find the uncertainty associated with this number to be 0.0316479825… Continue reading Uncertain Pop Quiz
Science Blogging or Blogging Science?
Bora/ coturnix over at Science and Politics has generated a lot of conversation via his taxonomy of science blog posts, mostly relating to the call for people to start publishing data and hypotheses on blogs. Much of the discussion that I’ve seen centers on the question of “scooping” (see, for example, here and here), but… Continue reading Science Blogging or Blogging Science?
New Aggregator
The people (well, person) who brought you the physics blog aggregator Mixed States have now rolled out a new biology-themed blog aggregator: Recombinants. At the moment, it only has about six feeds going into it, and the content is about 70% PZ Myers, so head over there and suggest some biology feeds to be added… Continue reading New Aggregator
Big Questions
Via BioCurious, a list of science questions every high school graduate should be able to answer: What percentage of the earth is covered by water? What sorts of signals does the brain use to communicate sensations, thoughts and actions? Did dinosaurs and humans ever exist at the same time? What is Darwin’s theory of the… Continue reading Big Questions
Most Shafted Physicist: A Biased Response
Over at the Seed editors blog, Maggie Wittlin asks who’s the most overlooked scientist: Which scientist (in your field or beyond) has been most seriously shafted? This could be taken two ways: Who deserves to be more recognized, revered and renowned today than he or she is? Who got passed over, ridiculed, etc. the most… Continue reading Most Shafted Physicist: A Biased Response
Call for Posts: Enough is Enough
Back when ScienceBlogs was all new and shiny, I did a couple of posts asking questions of the other bloggers. I got involved with other things after a while, and stopped posting those, so I’m not sure this will still work, but here’s a question for other ScienceBloggers, or science bloggers in general, that I… Continue reading Call for Posts: Enough is Enough
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… Continue reading Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off
Every Day I Write (in) the (Lab) Book
One of the features I always like in the print edition of Seed is the lab notebook pictorial. Every month (or, at least, all three of the months that I’ve looked at the print edition), they publish a reproduction of a page or two from the lab notebook of a working scientist. It’s sort of… Continue reading Every Day I Write (in) the (Lab) Book