Stories by Jennifer Ouellette

So it was a slow week in physics news — eh, who am I kidding? Higgs mania hit a fever pitch as the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics went, as predicted by many, to Peter Higgs and Francois Englert for their work developing the theory that predicted the Higgs boson, experimentally verified at CERN last [...]

This week, Quanta kicked off a five-part series on science and big data, starting with Imagining Data Without Division. Part 2: A Digital Copy of the Universe, Encrypted.

Bill Nye the Science Guy’s much-touted appearance on the new season of Dancing with the Stars came to an abrupt end last night when he failed to garner enough fan votes to make up for the low scores his dancing earned from the judges, and was sent home.

Six years ago tomorrow, I married the best person ever, and we’re currently in Vegas celebrating this milestone. Best anniversary gift ever?

We promise to get back to actual blogging soon; too many irons in the fire over the last six weeks. But in the meantime, here’s the usual weekly roundup of tasty physics tidbits.

In case you missed it, you can listen to my Virtually Speaking Science conversation in Second Life with biorobotics wizard Malcolm MacIver (Northwestern University) at Blog Talk Radio.

Yes, summer is officially over, but there was still plenty of physics goodness out there this week. The Man Who Invented Modern Probability – Chance encounters in the life of Andrei Kolmogorov.

This week at Nautilus, I wrote about two recent papers aimed at unwinding the Mystery of Namibia’s Natural Crop Circles. And while the official publication date isn’t until January 28, Jen-Luc Piquant was psyched to receive the bound galleys of my new book: Me, Myself and Why: Searching for the Science of Self.

As a diehard fan of Sherlock Holmes, I sometimes envy my (now former) SciAm co-blogger Maria Konnikova for figuring out to combine her love for Holmes with her field of psychology (cf.

There was an embarrassment of riches this week over at Nautilus. We learned that An Arguably Unreal Particle Powers All of Your Electronics.   Tom Siegfried explored Science’s Significant Stats Problem: Researchers’ rituals for assessing probability may mislead as much as enlighten.

Welcome to another eclectic collection of physics-ish links. This week on Nautilus, I wrote about how that Quirky Muon Just Might Spur a Physics Breakthrough—Again.

This week, I wrote about quasicrystals for Nautilus, telling the story of unlikely rocks found in unlikely places: Siberia, outer space, and medieval mosques.  And here’s something a wee bit different: I chatted with the folks at the Hiyaa!

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the rules of time travel in the new(ish) SyFy series Continuum for Nautilus. It’s among my favorite current series, and not just because it offers an intelligent treatment of what one might call the Time Traveler’s Dilemma: deciding between “Whatever happened, happened and I can’t change the [...]

“Eighteen nouns and three verbs, they’re in her fingers now. I need only time to push one of them into her mind. One, and everything under the sun will follow.” — Annie Sullivan, The Miracle Worker Over one hundred years ago, a baby girl fell ill with what may have been scarlet fever (or meningitis), [...]

Over the weekend Jen-Luc Piquant found herself pondering the works of Herodotus, specifically the tale of the Lost Army of Cambyses. Sometime around 524 BC, priests at the oracle of the Temple of Amun decided they didn’t much care for their new ruler, Cambyses II, son of Cyrus the Great.

If this week’s link fest has a theme, it might just be teleportation. I wrote about The Trouble With Teleportation for Nautilus this week, a.k.a., why the pig lizard in Galaxy Quest met with an icky end.  The same issue featured a cool science fiction short story in, which one woman faces a tough choice [...]

There was tons of interesting transport-related stuff at Nautilus this week, including my own post on The Time-Honored Quest to Find the Rules of Time Travel — in which I squee about my favorite new TV series, SyFy’s Continuum.