Physical Sciences
pharyngula | June 26, 2010Skeptic organizations often face a nagging dilemma: should they be openly skeptical about religion? There are a couple of very good reasons why they should make criticizing religious claims a secondary issue, and one extremely bad reason that represents intellectual cowardice and a betrayal of skeptical principles. I'm going to come down on the side of accepting that skeptics groups can make accommodations to religious individuals in general, but that they must not avoid confrontation with religious ideas in particular.
What are the good reasons for shying away from religious conflict? One is…
ksnyder | June 23, 2010A little more than one year ago, on the day of its groundbreaking ceremony, the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II) construction site was nothing more than a whole lot of dirt. Today, it's...well, take a look for yourself.
The NSLS-II construction site on the day of the groundbreaking ceremony, June 15, 2009, and...
...exactly one year later
Construction is quickly progressing on the $912 million facility, which will be the world's most brilliant light source. Eh, what's a "light source?" Basically, it's a particle accelerator that, in a controlled manner, sheds light of…
drorzel | June 22, 2010A press release from Harvard caught my eye last week, announcing results from Markus Greiner's group that were, according to the release, published in Science. The press release seems to have gotten the date wrong, though-- the article didn't appear in Science last week. It is, however, available on the arxiv, so you get the ResearchBlogging for the free version a few days before you can pay an exorbitant amount to read it in the journal.
The title of the paper is "Probing the Superfluid to Mott Insulator Transition at the Single Atom Level," which is kind of a lot of jargon. The key image is…
drorzel | June 22, 2010
slacktivist: Big shoes
"But what I think people meant about [Manute] Bol's "killer instinct" was that he never seemed to take the game of basketball quite seriously enough. He hadn't chosen this game, it had chosen him. It discovered him in that Sudanese village and plucked him out of it, whisking him halfway around the world. All for the sake of a game.
ManuteNancy Bol always seemed bewildered and slightly amused by that. Eugene McCarthy said that politics was like being a football coach, "You have to be smart enough to understand the game and dumb enough to think it's important."
Manute…
drorzel | June 17, 2010There's a paper in the Journal of Political Economy that has sparked a bunch of discussion. The article, bearing the snappy title "Does Professor Quality Matter? Evidence from Random Assignment of Students to Professors," looks at the scores of over 10,000 students at the US Air Force Academy over a period of several years, and finds a small negative correlation between the faculty effect on performance in an introductory course and performance in a follow-on course. In other words, as they explain in the Introduction,
[O]ur results indicate that professors who excel at promoting…
gboustead | June 16, 2010Have a story to tell from the 2010 World Science Festival?
Maybe it was something you learned? (Like, for instance, if the Earth were to be a black hole it would have to collapse to the size of a grain of sand.) Perhaps it was a serendipitous chat you had when bumping into your favorite scientist, artist, or author over the weekend's festivities? (I had a charming chat with Dr. John Mather and his wife about the crude pocket telescopes he used as a child that ultimately inspired him to take a closer look at the cosmos.) Or maybe it was a conversation you had with friends inspired by one of…
gregladen | June 16, 2010In a paper that is about to be published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, researchers Andrew Heymsfield, Patrick Kennedy, Steve Massie, Crl Schmitt, Zhien Wang, Samuel Haimov and Art Rangno make the claim that "The production of holes and channels in altocumulus clouds by two commercial turboprop aircraft is documented for the first time. ... Holes and channels in supercooled altocumulus clouds can be the result of homogeneous ice nucleation induced by turboprop and jet aircraft at temperatures warmer than previously accepted for commercial aviation influences on…
drorzel | June 15, 2010Tommaso Dorigo has an interesting post spinning off a description of the Hidden Dimensions program at the World Science Festival (don't bother with the comments to Tommaso's post, though). He quotes a bit in which Brian Greene and Shamit Kachru both admitted that they don't expect to see experimental evidence of extra dimensions in their lifetime, then cites a commenter saying "Why the f*** are you working on it, then?" Tommaso offers a semi-quantitative way to determine whether some long-term project is worth the risk, which is amusing.
I was reminded of this when I looked at the Dennis…
drorzel | June 14, 2010
In Defense of Evolutionary Psychology: Why They're Asking The Wrong Questions : The Thoughtful Animal
"Evolutionary Psychology suffers from a PR problem, which can be mostly blamed on ignorant (even if well-intentioned) members of the population who don't know what they're talking about.
Evolutionary psychology attempts to describe the evolution of the mind and of behavior and, well, everyone has a mind, and everyone can observe behavior. This makes people think that they are experts. Anybody who has ever had a child knows everything there is to know about child development. Anybody who has…
esiegel | June 12, 2010"If we lived on a planet where nothing ever changed, there would be little to do. There would be nothing to figure out. There would be no impetus for science. And if we lived in an unpredictable world, where things changed in random or very complex ways, we would not be able to figure things out. But we live in an in-between universe, where things change, but according to patterns, rules, or as we call them, laws of nature. If I throw a stick up in the air, it always falls down. If the sun sets in the west, it always rises again the next morning in the east. And so it becomes possible to…
pharyngula | June 11, 2010It's the return of Andrew Rosenberg!
Hello Proffesor Myers,
I see that I have become somewhat of a celebrity amongst your endless supply of past-student minions on your forums. Its hard for me to reply to such a massive amount of information that was thrown back at me in the last 24 hours, but I will do my best.
First of all, you replied by asking me why I came to you with questions if I was "so intelligent" myself. I simply put my high school accomplishments down, not as a way to brag, but to try and show you that I was someone with the mental capacity to listen to your replies--not…
illconsidered | June 7, 2010Chris S recently posted a lengthy comment, an extended excerpt from a recent Proceedings of the Royal Society paper. Full citation is: Solar change and climate: an update in the light of the current exceptional solar minimum
Mike Lockwood
Proc. R. Soc. A 8 February 2010 vol. 466 no. 2114 303-329
The abstract is here.
It makes for a very interesting read with lots to think about so I though I would promote it to a post of its own....
The history of science reveals a series of 'controversies'. These often develop into a state where there is little debate within the relevant academic…
jstemwedel | June 4, 2010It's June already, and we still have not finalized summer plans for the Free-Ride offspring. (Hey, my semester just ended, and it was only yesterday that I wrapped up the Large Administrative Task That Shall Not Be Named Now That It's Finally Done. I've been a little distracted.)
Anyway, given that we're at the stage of summer planning where there are a lot of ideas still on the table, I decided to ask the Free-Ride offspring to muse on any science-y aspects of the possible summer activities they are considering.
Here's the younger Free-Ride offspring's list:
Sailing lessons.
We might want…
clock | June 1, 2010Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Cassie Rodenberg to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific)…
oracknows | June 1, 2010Of all the "alternative" therapies out there, arguably the most studied is the modality known as acupuncture. Perhaps the reason is that, unlike homeopathy, which based on physics, chemistry, and biology alone is so implausible that, for it to "work," huge swaths of well-established physics and chemistry would have to be shown to be not just wrong but extravagantly and outrageously wrong (making homeopathy far more akin to magic than science), or reiki, which, when you come right down to it, is nothing more than faith healing based on Eastern mysticism rather than Christianity, acupuncture…
cagapakis | May 28, 2010I don't get nearly as many emails asking for advice as I'm sure the lovely and talented Dr. Isis does, and I'm not sure if my advice can compare in quality and sassiness to hers, but I want to address the questions I get most often--how do you get into synthetic biology if your background is in something else, and how do you get into a PhD in synthetic biology?
While there are an increasing number of labs that work primarily on synthetic biology and schools with undergraduate iGEM teams, there are still very few (if any?) graduate programs that will write "Synthetic Biology" on your diploma,…
gboustead | May 28, 2010Sam McDougle joins us from re:COGNITION at The Beautiful Brain. Sam splits this time between behavioral neuroscience research at the University of Pennsylvania, playing fiddle in an Appalachian string-band, and drumming in an indie rock trio.
In my recent career as an undergraduate, I noticed a curious phenomenon–around my junior year, dorm rooms across the campus were suddenly spending Friday nights captivated by the wonders of the natural world, led along by David Attenborough’s poised intonations. BBC’s Planet Earth box set would soon be as ubiquitous in 18-24 year olds’ DVD collections…
rallain | May 27, 2010Even though I have taught courses like this before (in a sense, my last physical science course was like this), I really don't like these courses. I will classify a "tell and repeat" course as one where the instructor tells the students stuff and then the students repeat this on the test. Look around, it happens a lot. But really, what is the point?
Here are some example questions from a tell and repeat course (most of these I have used in a course - when you point a finger, 4 are pointing back at yourself):
What is the difference between a meteorite, a meteor, and a meteoroid?
Which has…
drorzel | May 27, 2010I was pretty sedentary on Wednesday, going to only two sessions, and staying for most of the talks in each. I spent most of the initial prize session getting my bearings in the conference areas, and talking to people I know from my NIST days.
In the 10:30 block, I went to the session on Alkaline Earth Quantum Fluids and Quantum Computation. Tom Killian of Rice opened with a nice talk on work his group has done on trapping and Bose condensing several isotopes of strontium; somebody near me pooh-poohed it as just a technical talk on evaporative cooling issues, but I thought Tom did a nice job…
drorzel | May 26, 2010The conference I'm at this week is the annual meeting of the Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics of the American Physical Society (which this year is joint with the Canadian version, the Division of Atomic and Molecular Physics and Photon Interactions, or "DAMPΦ." The Greek letter is a recent addition-- as recently as 2001, they were just DAMP.). As the name suggests, this is a meeting covering a wide range of topics, and in some ways is like two or three meetings running in parallel in the same space.
You can see the different threads very clearly if you look at the different…