April 20, 2009
In celebration of April 20th, I thought I'd show you a method for making fire that's so neat it will work -- without fuel or chemicals -- both on Earth (left) and in space (right).
We're going to do it without a match, without a lighter, and without friction. That's right, the next time someone…
April 17, 2009
Our song this week comes from the little-known band Elsinore, based out of Champaign, IL, and named after a city (with a great landmark) in Denmark. (Hi, Sili!) They've got just a couple of albums out so far, but here's one of my favorites for you to listen to -- the song Cannonballs off of Nothing…
April 17, 2009
How old is the Solar System? We know now, from a variety of astronomical, geological and solar evidence that we're looking at about 4.5 billion years. But in the 19th century, there was a huge problem. Here's why.
On one hand, you had evolutionary biology and evolutionary biologists.
Charles…
April 16, 2009
It seems like it was just last week that I wrote about colliding dark matter, showing what happens when two galaxy clusters collide.
Well, nature has gone and one-upped me. Let me explain. Galaxy clusters are huge conglomerations of matter: normal matter (protons, neutrons, electrons, etc.) and…
April 15, 2009
Yesterday, after a long day, my wife and I settled in for some time to chill out, and turned on the TV. Although I'd never watch it on my own, I know my wife is a fan of watching The Biggest Loser, so I joined her for an episode last night. And to be completely fair, I think it's a wonderful thing…
April 15, 2009
Oh, yes, yes they do turn pink. You may be used to plain old "boring" spiral galaxies, like my buddy M74 over here.
A number of these galaxies happen to be "face-on" to us, so we can really get a good glimpse of what's going on in their individual spiral arms. Many of them, like the Pinwheel…
April 13, 2009
If you show people a cloudy, overcast day side-by-side with a bright, sunny one, almost everyone will choose the sunny day as the one that makes them happier.
Dave, one of Starts With A Bang's longest readers, is no exception. The extended winter he's living through in Kansas isn't making him any…
April 11, 2009
I don't normally post about science on the weekends, but this is too good to not tell you. Back in January of 2004, we successfully landed two rovers -- Spirit and Opportunity -- on opposite hemispheres of Mars. The views were immediately spectacular (click image for the full version).
Initially…
April 10, 2009
What better way to celebrate Easter weekend than with an old spiritual song about the birth of Jesus? This is the gospel song Last Month of The Year -- an old Southern American Spiritual -- sung and arranged by Jackson C. Frank. This is my favorite version of the song by far, as I really like its…
April 10, 2009
Everyone who's taken physics at some point knows about the Right Hand Rule. There are two versions. If you have a wire carrying an electric current, you point your thumb in the direction of the current and your fingers "curl" in the direction of the magnetic field.
The other version is that if you…
April 9, 2009
Last night, I had the pleasure of going to the Portland-area showing of the International Documentary Challenge. From March 5th-9th, 142 documentary filmmaking teams from 16 countries made short documentary films on the topics of Hope & Fear. I found out about it because I got solicited to be a…
April 8, 2009
Let me give you a little back story. As many of you know, I'm new to scienceblogs, and one of the first things we get to do is join a message board full of all the bloggers (sciblings) here. Well, suffice it to say, a contentious discussion took place between me and another scibling, which resulted…
April 7, 2009
I want to thank everyone for their great interest in my last post on dark matter! I got an awful lot of questions about what I mean by dark matter being "collisionless," and in particular, about this picture:
This is two galaxy clusters that have collided recently. The pink shows the X-ray…
April 6, 2009
Over the last few decades, we've learned a lot of interesting things about the Universe. One of the most groundbreaking is that most of the matter in the Universe is not made up of all the stuff we know as normal matter: protons, neutrons, and electrons.
This means that atoms, the basic building…
April 3, 2009
As a new tradition since we're on a new site, in addition to giving you a post about fun stuff on the weekend, I'm going to try exposing you to some new music, either by an uncommon artist or a song that really caught my fancy. This week's artist is Chicago-based bluegrass musician Colby Maddox,…
April 3, 2009
Last night, I was watching the Daily Show, and they had Tom Zoellner on, talking about his new book: Uranium: War, Energy, and the Rock that shaped the world.
There are certainly a lot of interesting things about Uranium in culture, particularly in terms of energy (hey, we can use this thing to…
April 2, 2009
Most of you know that different fonts and typefaces can give your documents a certain feel, a certain flair, or a certain artistic element that you wouldn't get using the same old font for everything. So, I was reading an article about a relatively famous typographer, Eric Gill, the developer of a…
April 1, 2009
One of the great things about the Hubble Space Telescope is that it's been in orbit for nearly 20 years now, meaning that it's amassed a huge archive of data.
Now, one of the things that the Hubble Space Telescope is notoriously bad at is finding planets. Why? Because if you want to do it, you…
March 31, 2009
Welcome to our new home on the web! For those of you who are longtime readers of Starts With A Bang!, I welcome you to our new location! And to those of you who see me as a new face, it's my pleasure to meet you!
I'm looking forward to a long and healthy partnership with scienceblogs and their…
May 23, 2008
Brought to you by Max Cannon, creator of Red Meat and also the dude who helps run the awesome independent Loft Cinema here in Tucson:
Hilarious...
Also, if you haven't caught it yet, don't forget to check out this week's Carnival of Space, where we have an entry about actually seeing a supernova…
May 23, 2008
We need one of those propaganda videos, like the Marines had when I was a kid:
Seriously, I remember watching that and actually thinking it would be awesome to be a Marine! (And for those of you who don't know me that well, I loathe armed conflict.)
Well, I'm a scientist. Can't we do anything cool…
May 22, 2008
The laws of physics are the same forwards in time as they are backwards, right?
At least, that's what some physicists will tell you. They have (some) good reasons for saying this. After all, if you watch the planets orbit the Sun, they look like they obey the same laws of physics whether you watch…
May 21, 2008
We know, more or less how supernovae work. We've seen them just hours after they first go off through telescopes and satellites. The Crab Nebula, also known as M1, was a supernova that went off nearly 1,000 years ago in our own galaxy, for example, and we can simulate pretty well that it formed…
May 20, 2008
Some of you who've been following astronomy for awhile might remember this report, where a group of astronomers reported finding a giant "void" in the Universe.
What is a void? Well, galaxies are distributed pretty randomly, but because of gravity, they cluster together. A small example is our…
May 19, 2008
No, really, I can hang with the big boys!
Although this is usually something we hear from people who are seemingly out of their league, due to diminutive stature, here on Earth:
(Muggsy Bogues is awesome.) Apparently, there are stars out there that have the same Napoleon Complex. According to this…
May 17, 2008
Sometimes, you find weird stuff on the internet. But sometimes you find even weirder stuff in scientific journals. To what do I refer? A paper in the Journal of Mathematical Geology back in 2000 entitled Godzilla from a Zoological Perspective, by Per Christiansen.
This was written as a critique of…
May 16, 2008
This has been all over my inbox since the press release came out yesterday; it's been on slashdot (thanks Brian), it's been at space.com, and there's a mediocre writeup on Universe Today. What's the big news? Black Holes don't destroy information after all!
What is this whole information thing,…
May 15, 2008
Sure, astronomers might not call it a planet anymore, but every schoolchild knows how badass Pluto really is. It's got a giant moon, Charon, and two smaller ones, Hydra and Nix.
In addition to being colder than ice with an average temperature of 44 Kelvin (that's colder than liquid nitrogen), I'm…
May 14, 2008
Good news for science from... the Vatican? No joke. Father Gabriel Funes, director of the Vatican Observatory and chief astronomer for the Pope, has just issued a public statement stating the following things:
Intelligent beings could exist in outer space.
Life on Mars cannot be ruled out.
The…
May 14, 2008
When I think of molecules, I think of Conan O'Brien doing his skit where he plays Moleculo...
the molecular man! I don't think of astronomy, and I certainly don't think of the leftover radiation from the big bang (known as the cosmic microwave background)! But somebody over at the European…
