Technology
drorzel | August 10, 2011PhD thesis delight | Turning mirrors
"In the beginning vast public funding created heavenly lab-space on earth. Now the labs were formless and empty and the spirited physicists were contemplating over their future experiments. And they said let there be light and they built a grating stabilised external cavity diode laser. And they said let there be an optical table to separate the floor from the ceiling. And it was bought. And they browsed through catalogues from Thorlabs, MiniCircuits, and Farnell and populated the optical table and the racks above it and the entire floor-space below it.…
gregladen | August 6, 2011We dropped the atomic bomb on japan today (in 1945) and that caused a lot of changes in the world. The idea of a bomb like this was so outrageous that it was actually possible to keep the project secret even though thousands of people worked for months on it, at many different locations. In one plant where nuclear material was being enriched people were told to make up whatever they wanted when asked what they were doing, as long as they avoided saying what they were doing. This was a bit risky because they didn't actually know, as mere cogs in a larger and incomprehensible machine, what…
drorzel | August 4, 2011I didn't pay that much attention to the mini-controversy over the NSF's proposed revision of its grant evaluation criteria when they were first released, because I was working on the book. I was asked to say something about it yesterday, though, and having gone to the trouble, I might as well say something on the blog, too.
The main source of complaint is the "Broader Impacts" section of the grant, a category that has always been sort of nebulous, but which the new standards attempt to clarify:
Collectively, NSF projects should help to advance a broad set of important national goals,…
tfk | August 3, 2011I didn't blog about the debt ceiling becauseâ¦Â ugh. The idea that the Republican party would hold the country, and indeed the world economy, hostage is unimaginably awful. The idea that, in the midst of a recession barely worse than the Great Depression, we're talking about cutting government spending is also absurd. It's a failure of governance and of leadership. Far from being ashamed, Mitch McConnell is gloating about it.
The Left is riled up, and righteously so. The problem is that most of the ire seems to be directed at the President, with talk of a primary challenge and so forth.…
jtoney | July 30, 2011
"Daddy, do you know where this cheese came from?"
I absolutely love this video demonstrating that learning science can be - and should be - fun. Enjoy!
This series is a result of a collaboration between broadcast media (NBC) and scientists (National Science Foundation.)
From Eureka Alert:
National Science Foundation and NBC Learn launch 'Chemistry Now' video series
Videos celebrate International Year of Chemistry; available cost-free to students, teachers and fans of chemistry.
In celebration of the International Year of Chemistry, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and NBC Learn, the…
kcollins | July 22, 2011Fed by the news media, our fascination and reverence for celebrities has reached shameless heights.
But when you add the element of royalty to the mix, celebrity worship can take off into the stratosphere, triggered even by an item as seemingly mundane as a dress.
This leaves me wondering -- and angered -- over what is happening to us and our priorities.
I'm referring most recently to the whirlwind North American tour this month of newly weds Prince William and Duchess Kate Middleton (a.k.a. Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge), who seem to be a wonderful couple committed to fostering…
kcollins | July 11, 2011Lifting off with the Expedition 14 mission crew on September 18, 2006, American businesswoman Anousheh Ansari made headlines around the world as the first female private space explorer. In doing so, Anousheh, an engineer by training, also earned a place in history as the fourth private explorer to visit space and the first astronaut of Iranian descent.
Asked before her historic mission to the International Space Station what she hoped to achieve on her spaceflight, she said, "I hope to inspire everyone--especially young people, women, and young girls all over the world, and in Middle Eastern…
esiegel | July 8, 2011"Where there is an observatory and a telescope, we expect that any eyes will see new worlds at once." -Henry David Thoreau
The night sky is our greatest glimpse of what lies out there, beyond our own world, in the expanse of space we know as our Universe.
Image credit: European Southern Observatory.
With our naked eyes, we are able to see a few thousand stars, the Moon, five planets, the Milky Way and a few other nebulous "clouds" or "fuzzballs." And with just our naked eyes alone, we could learn some remarkable things about the Universe, including the basic structure of our Solar System…
kbonham | July 8, 2011The field of immunology has a few quirks. I'm sure this is no different than other fields of study, but one of the most puzzling (and sometimes infuriating) of these quirks is an obsession with categorizing different types of cells. Case in point, a recent paper in Nature Immunology:
A semi-invariant Vα10+ T cell antigen receptor defines a population of natural killer T cells with distinct glycolipid antigen-recognition properties
But before I get into that, allow me to provide some back-story.
Identifying Cells
First, I should be clear, immunology isn't alone in trying to delineate…
cmonforton | June 23, 2011Rhetoric has been flying this year, especially in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, about the "burdens" of federal regulations. Many of these members seem to despise EPA rules, CSPS rules, healthcare rules, and OSHA rules. Many of their talking points come from groups like the Heritage Foundation with their reports "Red Tape Rising: Obama's Torrent of New Regulations," and "Rolling Back Red Tape: 20 Regulations to Eliminate," and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's multi-media "Regulations: Restoring Balance" campaign. Many House members were embolden early in the…
sciencepunk | June 23, 2011From the Journal of Things Kurt Vonnegut Warned Us About, Japanese scientists have discovered a way to make water freeze at room temperature.
Image CC Nicholas Bufford
The team of scientists were investigating the properties of water molecules wrapped in single-atom thick carbon nanotubes. The nanoconfined water displayed several unusual properties. Most striking was that as the width of the carbon nanotube decreased, the melting point of the water trapped inside rose. These "tubule ices" are unlike any seen in bulk water, and can even occur at room temperatures.
Thankfully, there's no…
lborkowski | June 5, 2011Thirty years ago today, the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report published a report of five young men with Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia who were treated at three different hospitals in Los Angeles, California. The authors observed that all five patients had no known common contacts, but had in common the fact that they "reported having frequent homosexual contact with various partners" and using inhalant drugs. An accompanying editorial note explained:
Pneumocystis pneumonia in the United States is almost exclusively limited to severely immunosuppressed patients (1). The occurrence…
drorzel | June 1, 2011One of the interesting things about reading David Kaiser's How the Hippies Saved Physics was that it paints a very different picture of physics in the mid-1970's than what you usually see. Kaiser describes it as a very dark time for young physicists, career-wise. He doesn't go all that deeply into the facts and figures in the book, but there's plenty of quantitative evidence for this. The claim of the book is that this created a situation in which many younger physicists were pushed to the margins, and thus began to work on marginal topics like quantum foundations, which thus began be be…
drorzel | May 26, 2011As I've mentioned before, I'm schedule to teach a class on "A Brief History of Timekeeping" next winter term as part of the Scholars Research Seminar program. Even though I have a hundred other things to do, I continue to think about this a lot.
One of the goals of the course is to introduce students to the idea of doing research. This was primarily conceived as a humanities/ social sciences sort of thing, so most of the discussion I've seen about these has been in terms of library research. Of course, as a physicist, I very rarely need to look things up in the library. when I think about…
bioephemera | May 20, 2011A CSPO webcast entitled "New Tools for Science Policy" asks an interesting, if somewhat odd, question about science and art: "Can art and religion serve as methods for governing emerging science and technology?"
More details:
Tuesday, May 24, 2011, 5:30 p.m. EDT (webcast will be here)
Participants:
Dr. Greg Graffin, Recent author of Anarchy Evolution, professor of evolutionary biology at Cornell University, and lead singer of Bad Religion, one of the most successful punk rock bands in the world.
Steve Olson, Co-author with Dr. Graffin of Anarchy Evolution, freelance writer, and former Special…
jtoney | May 19, 2011
Figure 1. Miniaturized radio transmitters attached to bumblebees.
(a) Transmitter attachment on a Bombus terrestris individual kept in a glass tube with opened gauze where the transmitter is fixed with superglue. (b) Nectar collecting individual of Bombus terrestris on Phacelia flower having a transmitter attached. (c) Bombus terrestris individual with attached transmitter, foraging on red clover (Trifoliumpratense).
Can you imagine being able to track a single bumblebee over the course of a day? German and Danish scientists accomplished this impressive feat. So what do those bees do all…
pharyngula | May 9, 2011I saw the new Thor movie tonight. I'll give you the gist of the movie, with no spoiler details.
First of all, atheists are allowed to watch the movie. The Asgardians are actually super-advanced aliens who live in a high-tech mega-city with trans-galactic transporter technology that uses wormholes. They use it to oppress distant worlds and impose their medieval political system on the universe. We're supposed to feel all right about that because the king is Hannibal Lecter.
Thor is a bad, foolish bully-boy who picks fights with the Blue Man Group, so Hannibal Lecter flings him to Earth to…
sporte | May 2, 2011It only takes a quick trip to the grocery store to see that familiar jobs are vanishing. Unless you're in Oregon, grocery store checkers are going the way of gas station attendants, travel agents, and secretaries. Jobs are changing, new jobs require different skills, and even those jobs will be obsolete within a short time.
Community colleges can cushion the blow by developing education programs in response to the needs of their local communities.
Not only do these programs help displaced workers, they help their communities attract new businesses and support economic growth. Georgia's…
drorzel | May 2, 2011Last summer, there was a fair bit of hype about a paper from Mark Raizen's group at Texas which was mostly reported with an "Einstein proven wrong" slant, probably due to this press release. While it is technically true that they measured something Einstein said would be impossible to measure, that framing is a little unfair to Einstein. It does draw media attention, though...
The experiment in question involves Brownian motion, and since I had to read up on that anyway for something else, I thought I might as well look up this paper, and write it up for the blog.
OK, so what did they do that…
mikethemadbiologist | April 27, 2011Joe Nocera knocked it out of the park yesterday, in his column about education:
[NYC Principal] González comes across as a skeptic, wary of the enthusiasm for, as the article puts it, "all of the educational experimentation" that took place on Klein's watch. At its core, the reform movement believes that great teachers and improved teaching methods are all that's required to improve student performance, so that's all the reformers focus on. But it takes a lot more than that. Which is where Saquan comes in. His part of the story represents difficult truths that the reform movement has yet to…