Envoronment
February 11, 2012
Starts With A Bang
Weekend Diversion: Interactive Scale of the Universe "The human world stands about midway between the infinitesimal and the immense. The size of our planet is near the geometric mean of the size of the known universe and the size of the atom. The mass of a human...
USA Science and Engineering Festival: The Blog
The Festival Recognizes Our First "Featured Fan"! The 2012 Festival is will be here this April and we thought it would be special to honor some of the people that make the Festival happen: our fans. The Festival would not be possible without the help of our partners, sponsors and exhibitors; however our fans play a huge impact in the success of the Festival.
February 10, 2012
Dynamics of Cats
Ominous signs for NASA There are several signs o'doom for NASA bubbling up out there...
February 9, 2012
Uncertain Principles
Random Note That Wouldn't Bother Normal People In a book that I read recently (either The Cloud Roads or The Serpent Sea-- I finished the first and immediately started the second), as some characters are traveling from one place to another, there's a passing mention that they...
Starts With A Bang
Hey, America! Break out the Binoculars after Sunset and see Uranus tonight! "The phenomena of nature, especially those that fall under the inspection of the astronomer, are to be viewed, not only with the usual attention to facts as they occur, but with the eye of reason and experience." -William Herschel We...
Greg Laden's Blog
Why did Phobos-Grunt fail? The Russian probe destine for the Mars system never made it out of Earth Orbit and recently crashed back into Planet Earth. Why did the rocket ship fail? There has apparently been a lot of obfuscation of what caused this disaster, but now there is...
Starts With A Bang
The Big Bang for Beginners "It took less than an hour to make the atoms, a few hundred million years to make the stars and planets, but five billion years to make man!" -George Gamow Let's pretend that, for all of our history on Earth,...
February 8, 2012
Greg Laden's Blog
Breatkthrough at Lake Vostok Rumors have been in the air for days, but we now think it confirmed that Russian Scientsts have penetrated the liquid part of Antarctica's Lake Vostok. The lake has been frozen over for something like 20 million years. Certainly there was life in it at...
Greg Laden's Blog
Melting Ice and Sea Level Rise If all the water currently trapped in all the glaciers across the entire world melted, the sea level would rise far more than most people imagine. Almost everyone living anywhere in the world at an elevation of below about 500 feet with a direct drainage...
Uncertain Principles
Course Report: A Brief History of Timekeeping 04 Through a weird quirk of scheduling, I haven't actually taught the intro modern physics course since I started writing pop-science books about modern physics. So, this week has been the first chance I've really had to use material I generated...
Greg Laden's Blog
Chemists Can Dance Actually, they can't, but they're having fun....
Uncertain Principles
How to Teach Physics to Your Polish Dog I have a Google alert set up to let me know whenever my name or the title of one of my books turns up in one of the sources they index. This is highly imperfect, sometimes missing interesting articles, and...
February 7, 2012
Uncertain Principles
Reminder: How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog Photoshop Contest A quick reminder: How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog (cover in the left sidebar) will be released at the end of the month. If you'd like to win a signed copy early, though, you can enter our Photoshop contest....
February 6, 2012
A Few Things Ill Considered
Another Week of GW News, February 5, 2012 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup...
February 5, 2012
Uncertain Principles
The Best of All Possible (Football) Universes Proving that you can find physics in everything, Sean Carroll points to a strange anomaly in the Super Bowl coin toss: the NFC has won 14 coin tosses in a row. The odds of this happening seem to be vanishingly...
February 3, 2012
Starts With A Bang
Saturn's Super Storm Staggers Skywatchers! "More days to come / New places to go I've got to leave / It's time for a show Here I am / Rock you like a hurricane!" -The Scorpions It isn't just Earth, of course, where these great cyclonic...
Uncertain Principles
Course Report: A Brief History of Timekeeping 03 It's been a little while since I wrote up what I've been doing in my "Brief History of Timekeeping" class, because I was out of town, and then catching up from being out of town. Some of this material has...
USA Science and Engineering Festival: The Blog
PopSci Returns as Valued Festival Media Partner! Popular Science, one of the leading sources of news in technology, science, gadgets, space, green tech and more, is returning as a key Media Partner with the Festival!
February 2, 2012
Uncertain Principles
How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog: Photoshop Contest It's now officially February, and the release date for How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog is only a few weeks off-- the official release date is Feb. 28. Of course, I've got a copy already: If you would like...
Uncertain Principles
Thursday Eratosthenes Blogging: Measuring Latitude and Longitude with a Sundial As I keep saying in various posts, I'm teaching a class on timekeeping this term, which has included discussion of really primitive timekeeping devices like sundials, as well as a discussion of the importance of timekeeping for navigation. To give...
Starts With A Bang
Defeating Hubble, from the ground! "The Earth's atmosphere is an imperfect window on the universe... atmospheric turbulence blurs the images of celestial objects, even when they are viewed through the most powerful ground-based telescopes." -John Bahcall There's no doubt that the Hubble Space Telescope has...
Dynamics of Cats
Planetary Habitability Laboratory The University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo has a very interesting facility that has put out some fun stuff...
February 1, 2012
Greg Laden's Blog
William M. Briggs has misunderstood a high-school level data graph And I suspect he's done so willingly. Well, you know what they say about statistics and liars. Here's the story. The Wall Street Journal and the Daily Mail independently published highly misleading and blatantly idiotic pieces on climate change. We've covered this extensively already over...
USA Science and Engineering Festival: The Blog
Come the Festival to Hear Featured Author Theodore Gray! "The periodic table is the universal catalog of everything you can drop on your foot"
Uncertain Principles
Critical Pronunciation Poll I'm using Dava Sobel's Longitude this week in my timekeeping class. The villain of the piece, as it were, is the Reverend Dr. Nevil Maskelyne, who promoted an astronomical method for finding longitude, and played a major role in delaying...
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Readers' Reactions
“That's why helium recycling is important. If I don't recycle my aluminum can, the problem isn't that we lose the aluminum from the earth, it's just that it will take more energy to get those atoms back into a useful form than if I recycled it. If I don't recycle my helium (and my guess is most users don't), the atoms eventually leave the planet.” Anonymous Coward on Why is Helium so Scarce?
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Synthetic Biology
Some engineers use cranes and steel to make their designs reality, but synthetic biologists engineer using tools on a different scale: DNA and the other molecular components of living cells. Synthetic biology uses cellular systems and structures to produce artificial models based on natural order. Read these posts from the ScienceBlogs archives for more:
Pharyngula May 30, 2007
“Playing God”
The Loom January 31, 2008
"Frankenstein Was Here": Synthetic Biology as Graffiti
Discovering Biology in a Digital World July 2, 2006
Build your own virus
