Physical Sciences
pharyngula | October 20, 2008Reader wombat found a fascinating site in response to the creationist debate in Kentucky, led by Dr. Ben Scripture. It's an utterly bizarre page about a petrified human brain, and it is typical creationist tripe. They have gathered a collection of "authorities", where they make much of their pedigrees (don't blame me, the "Dr. X, Ph.D." is the redundant formula they use on the site.)
Dr. Suzanne Vincent, Ph.D., a neuroanatomist(!) at Oral Roberts University
Dr. Ross Anderson, Ph.D. of The Masters College
Dr. Bedros Daghlian, M.D., a retired doctor
Dr. Ben Scripture, Ph.D. in biology
Dr.…
oracknows | October 18, 2008Orac gets e-mail.
Most of it's just brief notes with a link that someone thinks I should check out (and possibly blog about). Even though I occasionally make sarcastic remarks about being deluged with one story or other from time to time, I actually do appreciate those. Many have been the times when I didn't really have anything that floated my boat enough to blog about that a juicy tidbit sent by a reader prevented the blog from going dark for a day. Whether that's always a good thing, I leave to the reader to judge.
Occasionally, I get mail profusely praising the blog. Affectation of an…
clock | October 17, 2008We are busy preparing for The Open Laboratory 2008. The submissions have been trickling in all year, and a little bit more frequently recently, but it is time now to dig through your Archives for your best posts since December 20th 2007 and submit them. Submit one, or two, or several - no problem. Or ask your readers to submit for you.
Then take a look at your favourite bloggers and pick some of their best posts - don't worry, we can deal with duplicate entries. Do not forget new and up-coming blogs - they may not know about the anthology - and submit their stuff as well.
As we did last…
dmunger | October 14, 2008Yesterday we tried to replicate the effect that John Eastwood, Daniel Smilek, and Philip Merikle observed -- that negative facial expressions distract us from even the simplest tasks more than positive facial expressions. Hundreds of our readers watched one of two videos and were charged with counting the number of "upturned arcs" or "downturned arcs." Here's a sample video:
In this video, the "faces" formed by the arcs are smiling, but in the other video they were frowning. Both clips showed the identical number of upturned and downturned arcs -- six. Yet we weren't able to replicate…
pharyngula | October 14, 2008The Canadian Undergraduate Physics Conference is in trouble — government support has been flat, and corporate support has been declining. They are really in trouble: here's what I got from one of the people working on it:
The CUPC is the largest conference in North America organized entirely by undergraduate students. It brings together students from across Canada and the world studying a vast array of subject areas from mathematical and theoretical physics to medical biophysics to engineering and applied physics. This important event gives many students their first experience with…
oracknows | October 13, 2008Remember Sandy Szwarc of Junkfood Science?
It's been a long time since we've last encountered her. Indeed, it was last year when there developed a debate on whether her posts were suitable for the Skeptics' Circle. At the time, I was conflicted. In many ways, Ms. Szwarc seemed to be a skeptic--at least, when it came to most topics. However, when it comes to one topic, she is a crank, and that is the topic of the relationship between diet, obesity, and health. It's not obvious that she is a crank, and it took my reading her blog over several weeks before I came to the inescapable conclusion…
drorzel | October 9, 2008If you go by physics-related stories in the mass media, you'd probably get the impression that about 90% of physicists work at the Large Hadron Collider or some other big accelerator lab. The other 10% would be dominated by people working on foundational questions in quantum mechanics-- Bell tests, teleportation, quantum information processing-- with a smattering of people doing something with superconductors. The distribution in the physics blogosphere is pretty similar.
And yet, if you went by the mass media impression, you'd be way wrong. The largest division of the American Physical…
mspringer | October 9, 2008#6 - Ernest Rutherford
The New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford was an incubator of genius, and a genius himself. His position on this list is probably a little unorthodox as he wasn't a very flashy scientist and he wasn't a theoretical wizard. He just happened to be a surpassingly great physicist anyway.
When Rutherford started his work in the late 1800s, modern physics was still quite new. Classical mechanics had been fleshed out reasonably well, but relativity and quantum mechanics didn't exist, and the world of the microscopic was very poorly understood. The very concept that…
greengabbro | October 9, 2008As papers come through my RSS reader, I flag anything that looks interesting, with the vague intention of getting back to it later.
Ha, ha. Very few of the articles I flag actually make it through my periodic purging of the to-read list. Since Berkeley has finally figured out that I'm no longer a student and they should stop providing me with library access to journals, the barrier between "hm, looks interesting" and "I'm actually going to read this" has gotten even higher.
Below the fold: 5 papers that haven't quite made the hurdle.
Dating kimberlites in Kansas - Kimberlite pipes are…
cwilcox | October 2, 2008For those of you who don't know, there are awards handed out every year to people who "do a service to humanity by removing themselves from the gene pool," lovingly named the Darwin Awards. Great stuff, if you want to get a good laugh at someone else's stupidity, but this is better.
Every October real nobel laureates give out "Ig Nobel" awards to the best scientific research that makes you "laugh, then think." Organized by the Annals of Improbable Research, the Ig Nobel prizes are given in the same fields as the Nobel prizes, plus a few extra which vary year to year. The winners' research is…
jstemwedel | October 2, 2008Regular readers know that I frequently blog about cases of scientific misconduct or misbehavior. A lot of times, discussions about problematic scientific behavior are framed in terms of interactions between individual scientists -- and in particular, of what a individual scientist thinks she does or does not owe another individual scientist in terms of honesty and fairness.
In fact, the scientists in the situations we discuss might also conceive of themselves as responding not to other individuals so much as to "the system". Unlike a flesh and blood colleague, "the system" is faceless,…
drorzel | October 2, 2008This is the last of the papers I was an author on while I was in grad school, and in some ways, it's the coolest. It's rare that you get to be one of the first people to do an entirely new class of experiment, but that's what this was. It kicked off a new sub-field (or sub-sub-field...), the history and status of which was written up in Physics a little while back.
The ultracold plasma experiment may be the ultimate version of what we jokingly called the "NIST Paradigm" of cold-atoms physics research, which could be summarized as "I wonder what will happen if we stick this other laser in?" It…
neurophilosophy | October 1, 2008
Cataract 3, Bridget Riley, 1967.
In the 1960s, the British artist Bridget Riley began to develop a distinctive style characterised by simple and repetitive geometric patterns which create vivid illusions of movement and sometimes colour and often have a disorientating effect usually described by observers as "shimmering" or "flickering". With her explorations of the dynamic nature of optical phenomena, Riley became one of the most prominent exponents of what came to be known as Op Art.
Many optical illusions are generated by the brain, and studying them has provided us with a better…
oracknows | October 1, 2008When I first started blogging, I liked to refer to myself as a booster of evidence-based medicine (EBM). These days, I'm not nearly as likely to refer to myself this way. It's not because I've become a woo-meister of course. Even a cursory reading of this blog would show that that is most definitely not the case.
So what's changed? Basically, I've come to the realization that EBM is an imperfect tool. Don't get me wrong, EBM goes a long way towards systematizing how we approach clinical data, but there's one huge flaw in it. (I can just see a quack somewhere quote-mining that sentence: "Orac…
drorzel | September 29, 2008
A Tribute to Paul Newman | Popdose
"What the world will miss most about Paul Newman isn't his artistry as an actor and a director, both of stage and film, but it is his kindness and all-around stature as a good man."
(tags: movies society culture)
Study of Standardized Admissions Tests Is Big Draw at College Conference - NYTimes.com
"[William] Fitzsimmons, the dean of admissions at Harvard, led a commission of college admissions officials who drafted the study, which challenges colleges and universities to examine their use of the SAT and ACT and to consider whether the benefits outweigh…
sb admin | September 29, 2008In this post: the large versions of the Life Science and Physical Science channel photos, comments from readers, and the best posts of the week.
Life Science. A cheetah in the San Diego Wild Animal Park. From Flickr, by HBC4511
Physical Sciences. A Foucault pendulum in Milan, Italy. From Flickr, by sylvar
Reader comments of the week:
This week on the Life Science Channel Ed Yong looked at a study showing Elephants recognise themselves in mirror. Based on similar experiments performed on primates, the experiment places a piece of tape on an animal's face and has the animal look in a…
cortex | September 23, 2008This is interesting stuff. As G.K. Chesterton is said to have once said: "When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing - they believe in anything."
"What Americans Really Believe," a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the…
mspringer | September 19, 2008#9 - J.J. Thomson
The entire edifice of chemistry is a theme and variation on the study of the properties of atomic electrons. Tremendous sections of physics, from solid state to quantum optics to AMO and beyond hings almost entirely on electron behavior. Astrophysics, spectroscopy, and large chunks of high energy physics rely on the understanding of the electron. And those are just the leading edge of what the electron means to modern science. More than anyone else, we owe J.J. Thomson for what we know about the electron.
No one knew for sure that there was any such thing as an electron…
drorzel | September 18, 2008
...My heart's in Accra » Sumo and the cycle of nature
"Every two months, there's a 15-day basho. You can set your watch by it, if you happen to have one of those watches that's accurate only to the week."
(tags: sports Japan drugs blogs)
Basics: Making graphs with kinematics stuff | Dot Physics
"I think it is important that students understand the basics of graphing without using a spreadsheet or some other computer program. All too often students just feed numbers to a program and it spits out a picture."
(tags: academia education physics science blogs)
Quantum gas of ultracold polar…
drorzel | September 18, 2008I have often expressed a wish for there to be more physics majors, and more science majors in general. Given the demographic information in the previous post, is this just irresponsible feather-bedding on my part?
I don't think so, but that's because I would make a distinction between science majors, at the undergraduate level, and scientists, by which I mostly mean people with Ph.D.'s. The study mentioned previously concerned the supply of scientists, noting that the job situation is not good for Ph.D. scientists (though I suspect that this may reflect a shortage of academic jobs, not a…