Stories by Steve Mirsky

Young physicists find the specs to keep a race car off the beaten track

Pluto has at least five moons and an atmosphere—and now a new analysis places its diameter as bigger than its outer solar system rival, Eris  

 

Astrophysicist Ray Jayawardhana, of the University of Toronto, talks about his new book Neutrino Hunters: The Thrilling Chase for a Ghostly Particle to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe

When a white dwarf passes in front of its binary star system companion every 88 days, it acts like a lens to make the larger star appear brighter to us.

 

There are so many things in heaven and earth that coincidences become certainties

David J. Hand, emeritus professor of mathematics at Imperial College London, talks about his new book The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles and Rare Events Happen Every Day

Graham Farmelo is the award-winning author of the Dirac biography The Strangest Man. His latest book is Churchill’s Bomb: How the United States Overtook Britain in the First Nuclear Arms Race

Graham Farmelo is the award-winning author of the Dirac biography The Strangest Man. His latest book is Churchill’s Bomb: How the United States Overtook Britain in the First Nuclear Arms Race

The Elephant Listening Project, associated with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is recording thousands of hours of forest elephant vocalizations. Steve Mirsky reports

 

Paleontologist Neil Shubin's 2008 book Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body comes to PBS in a three-part series airing April 9, 16th and 23rd. Steve Mirsky reports

 

To paraphrase Inigo Montoya, this baseball stat—“I do not think it means what you think it means”

Stan Conte, vice president of medical services for the L.A. Dodgers, advised parents and coaches of young athletes to not consider Tommy John surgery on healthy arms for the sake of improving performance. He spoke at the SABR conference in Phoenix on March 13. Steve Mirsky reports

 

Smith College economics professor Andrew Zimbalist talks about his latest book, The Sabermetric Revolution: Assessing the Growth of Analytics in Baseball (co-authored with Benjamin Baumer), at the Bergino Baseball Clubhouse, with proprietor Jay Goldberg

The Monday after the change to Daylight Saving Time is marked by an increase in work-related injuries, probably due to a lack of sleep. 

Fiction's most famous spy seems to have had a major substance abuse problem

Journalist Lee Billings Talks about his book Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search For Life Among the Stars, Part 2 of 2

Journalist Lee Billings Talks about his book Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search For Life Among the Stars, Part 1 of 2

Scientific American technology editor Seth Fletcher talks about the recent Consumer Electronics Show and astronomy editor Clara Moskowitz discusses last month's American Astronomical Society conference  

 

Technology is making it harder for word thieves to earn outrageous fortunes

Rakesh K. Jain, director of the Edwin L. Steele Laboratory for Tumor Biology in the radiation oncology department of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, talks about his article in the February issue of Scientific American about interfering with extracellular matrix as a way to increase the efficacy of cancer therapy 

 

The 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry goes to Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel for applying both quantum and classical physics to develop computer models of chemical systems that show details of chemical reactions

The 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics goes to François Englert and Peter Higgs for the theory of how particles acquire mass, requiring the existence of the Higgs Boson, experimentally confirmed to exist in 2012

The 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine goes to James E. Rothman, Randy W. Schekman and Thomas C. Südhof for their discoveries of machinery regulating vesicle traffic, a major transport system in our cells

Ladling out the latest about life's origin