Stories by Jennifer Ouellette

It’s tradition for various science media outlets to publish their lists of biggest scientific breakthroughs of the year right about now.

It’s that time of year, when we all look back over 2014 and reflect on all the cool science stuff that happened. Today, Jen-Luc Piquant has compiled her Top 20 physics-themed videos of 2014 — with the caveat that not all of them were actually created in 2014.

If you missed this week’s Virtually Speaking Science, the theme was This Is Your Brain on Movies. I chatted with cognitive neuroscientist Jeffrey Zachs, author of  a fantastic new book — Flicker: Your Brain on Movies — about science, cinema, and the brain.

After Thursday’s aborted launch, the Orion Spaceship finally Blasted Off at Dawn on Friday morning. You can watch the official NASA video here.

Should you happen to live in the United Kingdom, Matt Parker — a.k.a. @StandUpMaths on Twitter — probably needs no introduction.

Chances are our US readers are still in recovery from Thursday’s feasting. Fortunately Jen-Luc Piquant has compiled lots of interesting links for your weekend reading pleasure while you recuperate.

Here’s a disquieting thought for your weekend: Dark Energy Might Be Stealing the Glue Holding the Universe Together. A new invisibility cloak simultaneously works for heat flow and electrical current.

“The Philae has landed!” Excitement over the Rosetta mission has been building for weeks, with tons of explanatory blog posts on what the lander is meant to find, helpful historical timelines, and an Astronaut Simulating the Comet Landing while on board the Space Station.

Last night the winners of the 2015 Breakthrough Prizes were announced, including the $3 million Fundamental Physics Prize — likely the most lucrative such honor in science.

It was a big week for physics in the movies, with the premiere of Interstellar, and the Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything. That translates into lots of pixels commenting on the science behind the films.

Hope everyone enjoyed their Halloween festivities. Here’s a few other related links: The ghostly glow of St. Elmo’s fire: it works the same way that a neon light glows.  The Levitating Halloween Pumpkin with a superconductor inside.  Bonus: More Conceptual Physics Halloween Costumes.This year, go out as The Holographic Principle!

Halloween is a week away, and for those in search of costume ideas, here are some Physics-Themed Halloween Costumes to make zombie Einstein proud.

Rejoice, my fellow fans of Manh(a)ttan (a.k.a. “Fanhattans”), for this critically acclaimed fledgling series on WGN America has been renewed for a second season, just in time for the season finale (“Perestroika”).

It was Ada Lovelace Day this past week, So Here’s The Life And Times Of Ada Lovelace, The First Computer Programmer.  Related: Beyond Emmy (Noether) and Sophie (Germain): Resources for Learning about Women in Math.  Also: Take the Guardian‘s quiz: how much do you know about women in science?

Secrets have a way of coming out, one way or the other, despite one’s best efforts to contain them, and boy howdy, do they ever on the penultimate episode of Manh(a)ttan.

It was the Nobel Prize announcement that launched a thousand “How many physicists does it take to change a light bulb?” jokes on twitter.

Relationships are fraying right and left, with betrayal, after betrayal after betrayal, this week on Manh(a)ttan, as we kick off the first (“Tangier”) of the final three episodes of the season.

There are just three episodes left for Season 1 of WGN America’s most excellent new series, Manh(a)ttan — or as Jen-Luc Piquant has taken to calling it, The Best New Show You’re Not Watching.

While everyone’s biding their time for next week’s Nobel prize announcements — and in some cases, indulging in some speculative predictions — scientific progress marches on.

Excitement is building — at least in science circles — for the upcoming announcements of the 2014 Nobel Prizes, along with the inevitable speculation about who might be among this year’s winners.

The beleaguered physicists in Frank Winter’s group finally get some good news on the implosion front in this week’s episode of Manh(a)ttan.

The big physics news this week was the announcement of the long-awaited results from the Planck missions — and the news is not good for the BICEP2 collaboration: the Study Confirmed Criticism of BICEP2′s original Big Bang Finding.  They may have had space dust in their eyes.

In physics, “spooky action at a distance” is a colloquial term for the famous EPR paradox, devised by Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen in the 1930s to describe the bizarre implications of quantum entanglement.

Last Friday I joined a contingent of Caltech physicists (including the Time Lord) for an afternoon of curling — yeah, you heard me, curling — in honor of Caltech theoretical physicist Mark Wise‘s 60th birthday.