Physical Sciences
pharyngula | February 16, 2010It's just sad. The arguments the apologists for religion make seem to be getting more and more pathetic, and more and more unconvincing. There is going to be a lecture, announced in the Times Higher Education supplement, by someone trying to reconcile science and religion in the history of the Royal Society. How is he going to do it? By arguing that members of the society in 1663 were religious. Woo hoo. They also wore funny powdered wigs, treated syphilis with mercury, and argued that there had to be precisely seven planets because it was a number sacred to geometers, but I doubt that he'll…
drorzel | February 12, 2010What's the application? Optical tweezers use focused light beams to trap small particles in the focus of the beam, and drag them around by moving the beam.
What problem(s) is it the solution to? 1) "How do we move these tiny little things around without touching them?" 2) "How do we measure the forces exerted by biological molecules?" 3) "How do we tie knots in DNA strands?"
How does it work?The basic optical tweezer scheme uses a single beam of light focused down to a very small spot. If you take some small (mostly) transparent object and place it in the beam, it will feel a force pulling it…
drorzel | February 10, 2010What's the application? Using lasers to reduce the speed of a sample of atoms, thereby reducing their temperature to a tiny fraction of a degree above absolute zero.
What problem(s) is it the solution to? 1) "How can I make this sample of atoms move slowly enough to measure their properties very accurately?" 2) "How can I make this sample of atoms move slowly enough for their quantum wave-like character to become apparent?"
How does it work? I've written about laser cooling before, but the nickel version of the explanation is this: You can think of a beam of light as being made up of photons…
drorzel | February 10, 2010
News: Anything But Studying - Inside Higher Ed
"Students' relatively small dedication of time to out-of-class studying has remained about the same since the survey was first conducted in 2003. In 2008, students in the physical sciences and engineering averaged 15.1 hours each week on out-of-class academic work; while students in the biological sciences reported spending 13.7 hours on academic work; students in the arts and humanities, 11.9 hours; and students in the social sciences, 11.5 hours.
In average weekly study time, the difference between a 3.60 GPA and a 2.79 or lower GPA is only…
oracknows | February 9, 2010If there is one aspect of "complementary and alternative" medicine (CAM) that can puzzle advocates of science-based medicine, it's why, given how nonsensical much of it is given that some of it actually goes against the laws of physics (think homeopathy or distance healing), CAM is so popular. Obviously one reason is that there are conditions for which SBM does not have any "magic bullet" treatments. Diabetes, heart disease, other chronic illnesses, SBM can manage them quite well, but it can't cure them. Then there are conditions that science doesn't understand very well, conditions like, for…
oracknows | February 8, 2010It looks as though Generation Rescue's bubble-brained spokescelebrities Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey have finally found their niche. Can you guess where it is? Come on, take two guesses! That's right. They've made it into NaturalNews.com, crossposted from a post they had their handlers make to Age of Autism, entitled A Statement from Jenny McCarthy & Jim Carrey: Andrew Wakefield, Scientific Censorship, and Fourteen Monkeys. Truly, it is one of the most hilarious things I've ever seen on AoA or NaturalNews.com. You'll see why in a moment. Suffice it to say that Jenny and Jim have the most…
clock | February 7, 2010The complete list of blog/media coverage of ScienceOnline2010 is becoming huge (and also swiftly falling down and off the page), but I wanted to put up on top just a choice of blog posts that completely or partially cover the 'journalism and media track' of session at the meeting, as I found them very insightful. I know, there were many other topics at the meeting, and blog posts covering them, but I feel the discussion of science in the media and journalism was the leitmotif of this year's meeting and it brought about some of the liveliest sessions and most interesting posts (not just for…
grrlscientist | February 5, 2010tags: evolutionary biology, paleontology, taphonomy, plumage color, feathers, color, melanin, eumelanin, phaeomelanin, dinosaurs, theropod, paravian, avialae, fossils, Anchiornis huxleyi, ornithology, birds, researchblogging.org,peer-reviewed research, peer-reviewed paper
New research reveals that recently-described 155-million-year-old Anchiornis huxleyi,
a woodpecker-like dinosaur the size of a modern-day domesticated chicken,
had black-and-white spangled wings and a rusty red crown.
Image: Michael DiGiorgio, Yale University [larger view]
Fig. 4. Reconstruction of the plumage color of…
edyong | February 2, 2010 No, this doesn't have Flash or a camera either. Nice text resolution, though...This post is long overdue. It has now been over two weeks since ScienceOnline'10 and the withdrawal symptoms (along with the SciPlague and jet-lag) have now subsided. I've already talked about how much I enjoyed attending the conference, catching up with old new friends, and moderating a panel on rebooting science journalism with three excellent gents - Carl Zimmer, John Timmer and David Dobbs. The session video still isn't up, but many of the key points have been ably captured through Twitter by Janet Stemwedel…
oracknows | January 29, 2010I've sort of alluded to it, but grant fever took over the last couple of days as the deadline approaches. Unfortunately, it happened right around the time when the GMC ruling on Andrew Wakefield came down and came down hard on him and his unethical behavior. Oh, well, as they say, it looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue. In any case, I doubt I'll get to Wakers before Monday, if then, given that there might be other things that catch my interest by then. In the meantime, as I recover from pulling a couple of near all-nighters in a row, check out this Classic Insolence from…
drorzel | January 28, 2010Last week's Seven Essential Elements of Quantum Physics post sparked a fair bit of discussion, though most of it was at the expert level, well above the level of the intended audience. such is life in the physics blogosphere.
I think it's worth a little time to unpack some of the disagreement, though, as it sheds a little light on the process of writing this sort of thing for a general audience, and the eternal conflict between broad explanation and "dumbing down." And, if nothing else, it lets me put off grading the exams from last night for a little while longer.
So, what's the issue? The…
sb admin | January 24, 2010
People
You cannot see the feedback that many participants at ScienceOnline2010 have already provided to Anton and me (keep them coming - we take the responses very seriously), but the recurring theme for the "highlight of the conference" question was "Meeting the People"; and the main request for the future is "provide more time for informal conversations".
You will see even more of that kind of sentiment if you peruse the growing list of blog coverage. Or glean it from photographs posted on Flickr and Picasa here, here, here, here and here. Or on YouTube videos here and here....
While…
clock | January 20, 2010
People
You cannot see the feedback that many participants at ScienceOnline2010 have already provided to Anton and me (keep them coming - we take the responses very seriously), but the recurring theme for the "highlight of the conference" question was "Meeting the People"; and the main request for the future is "provide more time for informal conversations".
You will see even more of that kind of sentiment if you peruse the growing list of blog coverage. Or glean it from photographs posted on Flickr and Picasa here, here, here, here and here. Or on YouTube videos here and here.
While Early…
drorzel | January 19, 2010Consider the air around you, which is hopefully at something like "room temperature"-- 290-300 K (60-80 F). That temeprature is a measure of the kinetic energy of the moving atoms and molecules making up the gas. At room temperature, the atoms and molecules in the air around you are moving at something close to the speed of sound-- around 300 m/s (give or take a bit, depending on the mass).
If you're a physicist or chemist looking to study the property of these atoms and molecules, that speed is kind of a nuisance. For one thing, the atoms and molecules tend not to stick around long enough to…
oracknows | January 19, 2010I'd like to start this post by thanking a commenter named Paul Grenville. He provided me with this blogging material and, indeed, may have supplied me with material for two blog posts. He did it by showing up in an old post about a homoepath named Jeremy Sherr, who has been bringing woo to the natives, so to speak, by treating HIV/AIDS patients in Africa with homeopathy. Sherr, as you may recall, Sherr had announced his plans to do "clinical trials" using homeopathy for HIV/AIDS and even bragged about treating Tanzanians with quackery. He then tried--shall we say?--to revise history by making…
esiegel | January 15, 2010This is what science is all about; getting thrown a curveball by Nature and plunging in to find out what's going on. -Andy Albrecht
Imagine waking up in the morning and heading out into the sand dunes. They never look exactly the same from day to day. But each day that you go out, they'll look somewhat like this.
You consider yourself smart and well-informed, and you have a sense of adventure. So each morning, you venture out a little farther into the dunes. You find a variety of different features, but everything pretty much just looks like, well, sand dunes. One day, however, all of that…
pontiff | January 13, 2010"The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve." - E. P. Wigner
Our universe, or at least our understanding of the universe, appears to allow us to see its naked underbelly only through the use of mathematical reasoning. As Wigner says about this state of affairs, we neither understand nor deserve this. On the other hand, I've come to believe, this observation can also be a huge aid in describing the world of theoretical computer science. There is no doubt in most…
sb admin | January 12, 2010
The year that just ended, 2009, was a year that saw huge changes in the world of media and the world of journalism. Science journalism has also been greatly affected, with many media outlets firing their science journalists first, then firing all the others afterwards. Much virtual ink has been spilled on the topics of "death of newspapers" and "bloggers vs. journalists is over" and "future of journalism", etc.
If you checked out everyone who's registered for the ScienceOnline2010 conference, or followed my posts introducing everyone, you have probably noticed that this, fourth meeting is…
drorzel | January 10, 2010
Philip Guo - On Popularity
"In sum, whether you are popular in middle and high school is largely out of your control, so it is unreasonable to aspire to become popular if you are not already popular. From my experience, the happiest teenagers are the ones who have accepted their status in the high school social hierarchy and made good friends with people of similar status."
(tags: culture education kid-stuff society essay)
Phys. Rev. Lett. 104, 013602 (2010): Manipulation of Nonclassical Atomic Spin States
"We report successful manipulation of nonclassical atomic spin states. We apply an…
oracknows | January 8, 2010I realize that I haven't done an installment of Your Friday Dose of Woo for a while--well over a month, in fact. Because of the gap between woo installments, I had been thinking that today was the time. There are at least a couple of really good candidates (and a host of halfway decent ones) in my Folder of Woo. However, sadly, another installment in the unfortunately never-ending story of YFDoW will have to wait at least another week. You see, the Bat Signal went up (or should I call it the Woo Signal?), and duty calls. What is the particular instance of someone being wrong on the Internet…