Physical Sciences
cwilcox | October 1, 2010Every year, the crew behind the Annals of Improbable Research honor research that "first makes people laugh, then makes them think." These awards, known as the Ig Nobels, honor some of the most entertaining research published in the past year. The competition is fierce, and the prizes highly coveted. But without further ado! This year, the winners are...
Engineering
Acevedo-Whitehouse, K., Rocha-Gosselin, A., & Gendron, D. (2010). A novel non-invasive tool for disease surveillance of free-ranging whales and its relevance to conservation programs Animal Conservation, 13 (2), 217-225 DOI:…
catdynamics | September 28, 2010The NRC rankings are out.
Penn State Astronomy is ranked #3 - behind Princeton and Caltech.
W00t!
PSU doing the mostest with the leastest.
The Data Based Assessment of Graduate Programs by the National Research Council, for 2010, is out, reporting on the 2005 state of the program.
The full data set is here
EDIT: PhDs.org has a fast rank generator by field.
Click on the first option (NRC quality) to get R-rankings, next button ("Research Productivity") to get the S-rankings, or assign your own weights to get custom ranking.
Astronomy S-Rankings:
Princeton
Caltech
Penn State
Berkeley…
oracknows | September 27, 2010I hate The Huffington Post. I really do.
Why, you ask, do I hate HuffPo so? I hate HuffPo so because of its history from the very beginning of its existence of promoting the vilest forms of anti-vaccine quackery and pseudoscience. It's because, over the last couple of years, not content with being the one-stop-shop for all things antivax on the Internet, right up there with Whale.to, Mercola.com, and NaturalNews.com, HuffPo branched out very early into quantum quackery, courtesy of Deepak Chopra. Just search for "Huffington Post" and "Deepak Chopra" on this blog and you'll discover how many…
stoat | September 23, 2010I don't, in general, read my fellow science blogs. Not because I hate them, you understand, but because they talk about other stuff. But I was lead to Inventing excuses for a Bible story, and getting them published in a science journal? and was immeadiately struck by (a) how strident it seemed, and (b) how backwards it all seemed. (a) I can excuse: I'm sure I seem the same fairly often, but hopefully not too often (b). Side note: I was "accused" recently of being tedious in my writing on wikipedia, at which I vigourously protested. But it became clear that she actually meant "tendentious"…
vlicata | September 16, 2010Scienceblogs is promoting the writing of "Science 101" general topic posts all through the "back to school" month of September. So, here is the first in a multi-part series on Heat Capacity in Biology:
Heat Capacity in Biology 101: What is it?
Heat capacity is basically a proportionality constant. For any substance, the heat capacity tells you how much the temperature of the substance will change when you add a specific amount of heat.
Here is an absolutely beautiful schematic illustration of the difference between a small heat capacity and a large heat capacity (from a website on the…
oracknows | September 15, 2010I'm a cancer surgeon.
I started out as a general surgeon, but my passion and scientific interest goaded me into specializing in cancer. Ultimately, I ended up subspecializing even more, ultimately becoming a breast cancer surgeon, but through it all cancer, not just breast cancer, has remained my clinical and scientific passion. So has science-based medicine. Developed as a response to the concept of "evidence-based medicine" (EBM), SBM postulates that clinical care should be based on the best science available, including the consideration of basic sciences and prior probability. EBM…
jdupuis | September 9, 2010That's the question Eugene Wallingford asks in a recent post at his blog, Knowing and Doing.
If you studied computer science, did your undergrad alma mater or your graduate school have a CS culture? Did any of your professors offer a coherent picture of CS as a serious intellectual discipline, worthy of study independent of specific technologies and languages?
In graduate school, my advisor and I talked philosophically about CS, artificial intelligence, and knowledge in a way that stoked my interest in computing as a coherent discipline. A few of my colleagues shared our interests, but many…
oracknows | September 9, 2010Here and elsewhere in the blogosphere, over the last several years, what started out as a more general interest in skepticism and science with a natural focus on medicine and a side interest in combatting Holocaust denial became more focused on promoting science-based medicine. As the saying goes, "Science, it works, bitches," and I make no apologies for promoting science-based medicine as the best medicine and applying skepticism and science to claims of purveyors of unscientific so-called "alternative" medicine advocates and anti-vaccine loons. However, I am not blind to the shortcomings of…
drorzel | September 9, 2010
Swans on Tea » I'm Not Willing to Believe You
"I'm perfectly willing to believe that the data one uses for one's thesis is gathered in three months, and my experience is similar, but that's not the whole story. A Ph.D. is not just the dissertation -- you can't just write off the experience leading up to it. To claim that you could just walk into the lab and take data means that you had the requisite knowledge and lab experience, which you must have acquired as an undergraduate. And I don't believe it."
(tags: academia education science physics biology experiment blogs swans-on-tea)
The…
drorzel | September 7, 2010In chapter 2 of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, there's a footnote about the ubiquity of uncertainty principle analogies in the mass media:
To give you an idea of the breadth of subjects in which this shows up, in June 2008, Google turned up citations of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in (among others) an article from the Vermont Free Press about traffic cameras, a Toronto Star article citing the influence of YouTube on underground artists, and a blog article about the Phoenix Suns of the NBA. Incidentally, all of these articles also use the Uncertainty Principle incorrectly--by the…
jgoldman | September 5, 2010
Links, links, and more links. Lots of good stuff this week.
Science
Brains and Beauty: a three-movement concerto was written inspired by a poem written by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, and set to images culled from the research of Hanna Damasio.
How does beer become whiskey? At the Guardian Science blog, Andy Connelly describes this delicious transformation.
Fascinating musings on comparative medicine from our friends over at the Dog Zombie. What is a wallaby?
Blog bff Scicurious writes about PCR - a technique that shouldn't work, but does.
In the NY Times, Carl Zimmer has probably the…
drorzel | August 31, 2010Over in Discover-land, Razib has a couple of posts about the content of science blogs, based on an analysis of the content of the top science blogs according to Wikio. Razib's second post is sparked by a pointed question from the author of the original study:
I'm now curious to find out why there are no 'popular' blogs in certain subjects. Do working condensed matter physicists who want to engage with the public write about astrophysics? Or are astrophysicists the only physicists who want to blog for the public? Or does the public only read astrophysics blogs?
This is, of course, an obvious…
oracknows | August 31, 2010I love it when my fans notice me.
After all, of what use is my having taken so many hours over so many years laying down on a nearly daily basis if my words don't have an impact? Surely I couldn't be so egotistical that I'd do it anyway even if my readership was what it was when I first started out and had not increased to the point where I'm the (alleged) force that I've become in the medical and skeptical blogosphere, would I?
Wait, on second thought, don't answer that.
In any case, back in the day I'd write my best snarky skeptical deconstruction of some bit of pseudoscience or another and…
rallain | August 26, 2010Might as well jump. Jump. Go ahead, jump. - Van Halen
Suppose everyone in the world got together and jumped. Would the Earth move? Yes. Would it be noticeable? Time for a calculation. Note: I am almost certain that I have done this before, but I can't find where.
Starting assumptions.
7 billion people.
Average weight: 50 kg (you know, kids and stuff)
Average vertical jump (center of mass): 0.3 meters - and I think that is generous.
Mass of the Earth: 6 x 1024 kg
Gravitational field near the surface of the Earth is constant with a magnitude of 9.8 N/kg
Ignore the interaction with the Sun and…
drorzel | August 24, 2010
The mismeasure of education « Confused at a higher level
"Put simply, it makes just about as much sense to obsess over these numerical rankings as it does to try to numerically rank favorite restaurants, or jazz songs, or single malt scotches, or ... you get the point. It is a false quantitative-ness about unquantifiable qualities that I've seen people deploy in all sorts of situations and to which I am occasionally prey myself, to be honest.
The unquantifiable nature of these things doesn't mean that there is no comparing these things. Of course there is. I've spent lovely evenings…
mspringer | August 22, 2010Here's an odd little bit of math for you this Sunday. It's defined in terms of recurrence. Recurrence happens when a function is defined in terms of itself. This happens more than you might think - one famous example is the Fibonacci sequence, which is informally defined by saying "To get the next term in the sequence, add the previous two terms together. The first two terms are 1 and 1." And so you can calculate that the sequence is {1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21...} and so forth. That sequence turns out to show up in various odd places in math and science, and recursively defined sequences are…
esiegel | August 21, 2010"There are people who make things happen, there are people who watch things happen, and there are people who wonder what happened. To be successful, you need to be a person who makes things happen."
-James Lovell, Astronaut: Gemini 7, Gemini 12, Apollo 8, and Apollo 13
A few weeks ago you had your chance to ask a commercial astronaut anything, and you gave some great responses! We selected the five best questions to ask the first group of commercial astronauts, including my favorite: the question of whether they'd be willing to go on a trip to Mars, even if it were doomed to be one-way.
Well…
drorzel | August 21, 2010
Swans on Tea » Politics and the Star Trek Effect
"There are a couple of episodes of Star Trek that I can recall having some fundamental physics failures, which would lead one to believe that in the Star Trek universe, one cannot do an integral over time. The episodes that come to mind (and it's been a while, so I may have some details wrong) are The Paradise Syndrome from ToS, and Déjà Q fom TNG. In both episodes, the Enterprise needs to transfer some energy and momentum to an object, and in each episode, they go for the Big Effort⢠and lose. "
(tags: science physics television blogs…
eklemetti | August 19, 2010The final part of Etna Week, brought to us by guest blogger Dr. Boris Behncke. Check out Part 1 and Part 2 as well!
Etna Volcanic hazards
By guest blogger Dr. Boris Behncke.
Etna is one of the most active volcanoes on Earth, and a population of nearly one million people dwell on its flanks, many in areas that have been repeatedly invaded by lava flows during the historical period. A few villages have been constructed very close to the vents of eruptions only a few hundred years old.
Top: Residential areas surrounding numerous pyroclastic cones on the lower southeast flank of Etna, seen…
catdynamics | August 13, 2010Decadal eTownhall meeting is about to start, and apparently some astronomy departments "forgot" to sign up for a webcast slot, so, like modern finance, those of us with the millisecond time advantage will leverage the advantage.
For the rest, here is the liveblog of the webcast, or find a tweet with no delay
(Derek is tweeting).
First question, no doubt, will be: "Roger, WHO chose the Muzak for the people waiting on hold...?"
and we're off...
apparently proceeds of the popcorn sales at the webcast sites will fund the new projects... hah!
Oh, that was not a joke.
We start off by emphasizing…