If you’ve seen the movie, Particle Fever (You haven’t? You can get it live streaming on iTunes today, and at other VOD services July 15), then you are acquainted with the ebullient American physicist Monica Dunford, an experimental high-energy particle physicist who helped bring the ATLAS detector at CERN into operation for the first Large Hadron [...]..
Robotic surgery has proved itself to be less than perfect so far. Stiff robotic limbs, burning surfaces, numerous complications. But what if that surgeon’s assistant was less like a standard robot—and more like an octopus?...
In the previous post, I listed a couple ways in which photographers digitally alter firefly photographs. How nefarious of them! I admit, however, the post was a wee bit facetious.
You can read the study itself here, plus a very comprehensive discussion of reactions to the study here. 1. If you intend to publish your research in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, you are expected to have conducted that research with the appropriate ethical oversight...
Over the coming month the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Rosetta mission will fire its main engines no less than eight times to tweak its interplanetary intercept course with Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko; eventually sidling up to the 4 kilometer wide cometary nucleus at about 7.9 meters per second in early August...
The first time I had ever heard of Quinacradone Burnt Orange (C20H12N2O2) was after starting to work for an art supply company, DeSerres, that I worked for for the next 10 years.
Now that firefly season is sparking up our eastern and midwestern summer evenings, I am starting to see not just the insects themselves but the attendant media buzz.
A hundred years ago this day in Sarajevo, disgruntled nationalist Gavrilo Princip fired a shot. An Archduke and his wife died, the world mourned and fulminated, and in a rash of misunderstanding and patriotic throes the nations of Europe went to war with each other, a war that in its calculated butchery exceeded all that [...]..
Getting a drug from conception to market is among the riskiest, hardest and most expensive of scientific and human endeavors, often requiring up to ten years of effort and anywhere between 1 and 5 billion dollars...
Take a break from the heat this summer to step into some cool galleries exhibiting scienceart. If the exhibits keep pouring in at this rate, I’ll have to split up this post by region...
This Westinghouse advertisement was published in The Literary Digest on November 30, 1918. The text reads as follows: Westinghouse ELECTRIC UTILITIES FOR THE HOUSEHOLD Fuel and Labor Many are the steps that electrical appliances save, and many the tasks they lighten...
On September 1, 1939, the same day that Germany attacked Poland and started World War 2, a remarkable paper appeared in the pages of the journal Physical Review.
This is the fourth installment of my monthly feature "Cool Sh*t I've Read Lately,” in which I draw attention to, um, cool stuff. (Here are columns one, two and three.) Breakthrough Journal...
Teachers Pay Teachers is a freewheeling online market where entrepreneurial educators sell lesson plans, powerpoints, and other didactic materials to each other.
In my professional field of molecular modeling and drug discovery I often feel like an explorer who has arrived on the shores of a new continent with a very sketchy map in his pocket.
We are all well aware of the immense role that carbon plays in our lives. However, have you ever thought about the immense reservoir of carbon that exists deep beneath the earth’s surface?...
We are all well aware of the immense role that carbon plays in our lives. However, have you ever thought about the immense reservoir of carbon that exists deep beneath the earth’s surface?...
Texas is well-known as the home of the oil and gas industry. Over the last decade it has also become the nation’s wind power leader. Today, it is poised to be America’s testbed for energy storage technologies...