It was a busy week! I hosted an hour-long discussion with Maria Konnikova, my SciAm bloggy sibling and author of Mastermind: How To Think Like Sherlock Holmes , in Second Life as part of Virtually Speaking Science...
This week saw the launch of a new science-and-culture magazine, Nautilus, with both print and online versions. I'll be contributing regular blog posts to the site.
First things first: There is a movement afoot of sorts within certain sectors of the high-energy physics community to rename the Higgs boson to better reflect all those who contributed to its theoretical development and eventual discovery...
Back when the Time Lord and I were still engaged, we went shopping for wedding rings. He only had one criteria: he wanted his ring to be made of platinum or a similar material forged in a supernova...
Forget Big Questions like dark matter, dark energy, supersymmetry, and the quest for a grand unified theory for a moment — what we really need physicists to focus on is the mystery of why strands of sweet, sticky honey can get so long and thin as they drip without actually breaking...
Let's face it: this was an unbelievably crappy week, what with the horrific events at the Boston Marathon. People deal with tragedy in many different ways.
Back in 2010, physicists were baffled by the results of an experiment to measure the radius of the proton using an exotic form of hydrogen. It was significantly smaller than expected: 0.00000000000003 millimeters smaller...
"The annals of theoretical biology are clogged with mathematical models that can be ignored or, when tested, fail." Biologist E.O. Wilson set off a mini-firestorm with an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal topped by a provocative headline claiming "Great scientists don't need math." The actual text was a bit more nuanced than that; Wilson's main point, supporters say, was to encourage students not to be discouraged from pursuing a career in science just because they struggle with math.Stepping up to the plate to bat for Wilson's team, Ashutosh Jogalekar wrote, "In many fields math is a powerful tool, but only a tool nonetheless; what matters is a physical feel for the systems to which it is applied."Others didn't see it this way, most notably Berkeley mathematics professor Edward Frenkel, who wrote an impassioned response for Slate...
Fans of British fantasy author Piers Anthony's Mode series may recall that the second book, Fractal Mode , speaks of a strange world that represents a perfect three-dimensional model of the famous (to mathematicians, anyway) Mandelbrot Set -- a stunning geometrical shape that results when you take a particular equation and apply it to a number, and then to the result, and then to each subsequent result after, ad infinitum .I've written about chaos and fractal patterns before, most notably in the work of painter Jackson Pollock...
This week kicked off with April Fool's Day, when I normally stay off the Internet until all the silliness subsides. But props to Fermilab for its April Fool's joke, "announcing" its new director...
We have been Down Under in the Land of Oz all week, but Jen-Luc Piquant has been zealously compiling cool physics-y links for you anyway. By the time you read this, we will be landing in Los Angeles, arriving earlier than we left Sydney...
"Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise. It has no commander, no overseer or ruler, Yet it stores its provisions in summer and gathers its food at harvest." -- Proverbs 6:6-8The above proverb adorns the Web page of Nathan Mlot, a graduate student in mechanical engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology...
New research has prompted a resurgence of interest in the patterning mechanisms Alan Turing proposed 60 years ago
When I was in fourth grade, my teacher asked us each to write a short "Just So" story in the manner of Rudyard Kipling, author of the classic children's book Just So Stories .
The big physics news this week was the latest results from ESA's Planck mission, but there was plenty of other good stuff circulating around the Interwebz.While everyone else was celebrating St...
I adored Twinkies as a kid, vastly preferring them to Ding-Dongs or SnowBalls, and my folks used to give me a box every Christmas. Jokes about eternal shelf life notwithstanding, I gobbled the spongy crème-filled cakes down greedily, naively confident that Twinkies would always be in stock for next Christmas.So even though I no longer gorge myself on Twinkies, I totally understood when the announcement late last year that Hostess was filing for bankruptcy gave rise to howls of anguish around the Internet over the prospect that many of the company’s tasty snacky-cakes would no longer be available to consumers – including Twinkies...
We were not hardy enough to stay up until the wee hours for the big announcement of the latest results from the Planck satellite mission, but it is all over the science blogosphere this morning, so we didn't miss much...
This week the geekerati celebrated Pi Day (March 14) -- which just happened to coincide with the confirmation that the "Higgs-like particle" discovered last summer by the Large Hadron Collider really, truly, is that elusive Higgs boson (seriously, I think "elusive Higgs boson" is now its official title) -- or at least a Higgs boson, as Michael Moyer explains...
Happy Pi Day! In honor of the occasion, Jen-Luc Piquant has dug up an archival post on a lesser-known historical figure you devised an ingenious method of calculating Pi...
Oscar season is over, and it's a shame all those A-List actresses looking to make a dramatic entrance didn't get to see the latest collection of couture dresses from avant-tech designer Hussein Chalayan...
