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PolySciFi Blog on Gerald Allen

You all remember Gerald Allen, I hope. He's the sub-moronic Alabama state legislator who is advocating a bill to ban from any public library or school in Alabama any book written by a gay author or that even mentions homosexuality. He was the one that our old pal Robert O'Brien jumped in to defend, which led to renaming of the Idiot of the Month award to the Robert O'Brien Trophy. Well now Matthew Dessem has done a detailed analysis of the text of his bill and found out that it actually bans much more than even Allen himself knows: So Mr. Allen's bill would ban any purchase or performances…

Any ornithomancers out there?

I beheld a strange sight when I stepped out my door this morning: a pair of cute little baby duckies waddling down the sidewalk, all alone and peeping frantically. They passed right by my house (of course—the miasma of evil is not inviting), turned left at my neighbor's driveway, went up the sidewalk, and hopped up the stairs to their door. It was so peculiar — I haven't seen any ducks in my neighborhood lately, and these two helpless ducklings were clearly lost — that I went up to the door, frightening the little guys away, to ask if they'd been raising ducks and had a couple of escapees.…

Wisconsin School Votes to Teach Creationism

The school board in Grantsburg, Wisconsin is just asking for legal trouble: The city's school board has revised its science curriculum to allow the teaching of creationism, prompting an outcry from more than 300 educators who urged that the decision be reversed. School board members believed that a state law governing the teaching of evolution was too restrictive. The science curriculum "should not be totally inclusive of just one scientific theory," said Joni Burgin, superintendent of the district of 1,000 students in northwest Wisconsin... The decision provoked more than 300 biology and…

Changing Course in Iraq

Here's a scathing article on Bush administration incompetency in Iraq, written by a retired Air Force Colonel and Central Command war planner: To discern the truth about Iraq, Americans must simply look beyond the spin. This war is not some noble endeavor, some great struggle of good against evil as the Bush administration would have us believe. We in the military have heard these grand pronouncements many times before by men who have neither served nor sacrificed. This war is an exercise in colossal stupidity and hubris which has now cost more than 1,000 American military lives, which has…

Rowe Nails the Marriage Amendment

One of the things that irritate me most in the world is how conservative authoritarians have hijacked the word "family". The ridiculous phrase "family values" - as though all families had the same values, or should - is a textbook example. So I cheered last night when I read Jon Rowe's post that nailed the failed attempt to amend the constitution to ban gay marriages perfectly: Lets be straight: The now failed FMA was fundamentally an anti-family amendmentone that insulted all gay families as well as every straight family containing an actual gay family member. Even straight families with no…

Taking Things Literally

After writing that post about the Moonies and wondering how on earth there could be millions of people who believed something so monumentally absurd, I came across this poll from ABC News: "I'm going to ask about a few stories in the Bible. Do you think that's literally true, meaning it happened that way word-for-word; or do you think it's meant as a lesson, but not to be taken literally?" Literally True Not Literally True No Opinion % % % "The story of Noah and the ark in which it rained for 40 days and nights, the entire world was flooded, and only Noah, his family and the animals…

How to tell a child that the Sun will someday die (Synopsis)

"It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness, that is life." -Jean-Luc Picard The cosmic story common to all of us -- where we came from, how we got here and where we're headed into the future -- is both amazing and daunting. But when we're first exposed to the vastness of it all in terms of both time and space, it can be downright terrifying. Image credit: NASA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI / AURA), Hubble Space Telescope / ACS. This is particularly true for young children, who often experience a huge existential crisis when they realize that not only…

Ask Ethan: does the climax of the movie 'Gravity' violate simple physics? (Synopsis)

"You've got to learn to let go." -Matt Kowalski, Gravity Objects in motion remain in constant motion unless acted upon by an outside force. That's Newton's 1st law of motion, and that's why you'd expect an orbiting satellite and two astronauts orbiting with it to have absolutely no relative forces. Image credit: Warner Bros. Pictures / Alfonso Cuarón, of the poster for the movie Gravity. Yet if you watched the movie Gravity, you saw that the two astronauts, Stone and Kowalski, definitely experienced forces relative to the International Space Station when they were hanging onto it by a…

Novel requirements for a college athletics program

The situation isn't at all funny—a female volleyball coach was made miserable and discriminated against because of her sexual preferences, and there seems to have been (and probably still is) a nasty culture of male privilege in Fresno State athletics—but this piece of testimony against the associate AD, Randy Welniak, was just icing on the cake. The one that sticks out was when Randy took me behind closed doors and said he had just learned of a situation where he just found out why Lindy was such a bitch. That he just learned she not only was a lesbian. She was an atheist. Uh-oh. Multiple…

Why college is so expensive, and how to fix it (Synopsis)

"When we make college more affordable, we make the American dream more achievable." -Bill Clinton Over the next four years, the University of Helsinki will see its budget reduced by approximately 100 million Euros, or about 15% of its annual expenditures. As a response, it's reducing its workforce by 980 members, a necessary cut given the budgetary changes. Image credit: E. Siegel, created at https://www.meta-chart.com/pie, with data from University of Helsinki here: https://www.helsinki.fi/en/university/strategy-and-management/universit…. Yet how they chose to cut their budget provides a…

Is The Multiverse A Scientific Theory? (Synopsis)

“Our knowledge of physics only takes us back so far. Before this instant of cosmic time, all the laws of physics or chemistry are as evanescent as rings of smoke.” -Joe Silk When people use the word theory colloquially, they use it to mean an "idea" or a "possibility" that could conceivably be at play. But a scientific theory has a much more stringent set of things it must accomplish: it must encompass all the successes of the previously leading theory, it must make successful predictions for phenomena that the leading theory cannot make, and it must predict additional, novel phenomena that…

The Closest New Stars To Earth Are In A Place You've Never Looked (Synopsis)

"You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life." -Albert Camus If you ask the average person where you can find new stars in our galaxy, they might (correctly) identify the Orion Nebula, a hotbed of star formation where thousands of new stars are presently being born. But at ~1,500 light years away, it's not the closest place where new stars are forming, not by a long shot. Image credit: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2; Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin. Instead, the southern hemisphere holds a…

Have Astronomers Found Alien Megastructures After All? (No, Probably Not) (Synopsis)

"Thou shalt not embarrass thyself and thy colleagues by claiming false planets." -Bill Cochran Last year, Penn State astronomer Jason Wright made headlines by claiming that one of the stars being observed by NASA's Kepler mission might contain alien megastructures around it. The large dips in its light curve didn't make sense in the context of planets, and the star KIC 8462852 became the target of a great many follow-ups. Image credit: Infrared: IPAC/NASA (2MASS), at left; Ultraviolet: STScI (GALEX), at right. A binary companion was found, along with no signs of excess infrared emission or…

Why Are We Made Of Matter And Not Antimatter? (Synopsis)

“If you see an antimatter version of yourself running towards you, think twice before embracing.” –J. Richard Gott III Everywhere we look in the Universe, we find that planets, stars, galaxies, and even the gas between them are all made of matter and not antimatter. Yet as far as we know, the laws of nature are symmetric between matter and antimatter: you can't create or destroy one without the other. Image credit: Karen Teramura, UHIfA / NASA. This question -- why the Universe is full of matter and not antimatter -- is one of the greatest unsolved problems in theoretical physics. Yet it's…

Mostly Mute Monday: Overlapping, but not colliding galaxies (Synopsis)

"I know there is strength in the differences between us. I know there is comfort where we overlap." -Ani DiFranco The observable Universe is a big, big place. Some 46 billion light years in all directions, with hundreds of billions of galaxies inside, it's no wonder that we see stars and galaxies in all directions we've ever looked. What's even more of a surprise, though, is that sometimes galaxies that aren't at all close together look like they are, and overlap. Image credit: Sloan Digital Sky Survey / William Keel, of NGC 3861. These optical illusions are caused by the uncommon…

I ♥ Seattle

Ahh, Seattle. Seattle is godless. We are, rather famously, one of the least churched cities in North America. It seems that most of us have better things to do on a Sunday morning than go to church. Seattleites would rather take a hike. Or nurse a hangover. Or fire up the bong. It sounds like my kind of place…and it should, I grew up there. So I'm taking a little vacation to the Pacific Northwest, and will be visiting family and taking in the sights the first week of July, from the 1st to the 8th. All you Seattleites can use this thread to tell me how wonderful the place is and what I ought…

Ask Ethan: How Do Black Holes Make Such Bright Quasars? (Synopsis)

"Twinkle, twinkle quasi-star. Biggest puzzle from afar. How unlike the other ones. Brighter than a billion suns. Twinkle, twinkle, quasi-star. How I wonder what you are." -George Gamow One of the most interesting classes of objects in the entire sky is one that's invisible to the naked eye, yet appears brighter than anything else in radio wavelengths: the quasar. Originally coined as an acronym (QSRS) for Quasi-Stellar Radio Source, these were later determined to be incredibly energetic sources of accelerated matter powered by a supermassive black hole. Image credit: Aurore Simonnet, NASA /…

It's cold today in Wagga Wagga

This is just one of dozens of responses to common climate change denial arguments, which can all be found at How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic. Objection: It was way colder than normal today in Wagga Wagga, this is proof that there is no Global Warming. Answer: Does this even deserve an answer? If we must... The chaotic nature of weather means that no conclusion about climate can ever be drawn from a single data point, hot or cold. The temperature of one place at one time is just weather, and says nothing about climate, much less climate change, much less again global climate change. This…

Atheist fires a shot across scientists' bows

Sam Harris has a letter in Nature today, urging scientists to unite against religion — even the moderate religion that so many are willing to support. But here is Collins on how he, as a scientist, finally became convinced of the divinity of Jesus Christ: "On a beautiful fall day, as I was hiking in the Cascade Mountains... the majesty and beauty of God's creation overwhelmed my resistance. As I rounded a corner and saw a beautiful and unexpected frozen waterfall, hundreds of feet high, I knew the search was over. The next morning, I knelt in the dewy grass as the sun rose and surrendered to…

Anti-Gay Politics in Alabama

This post at House Blend reports on a tactic being used by the Republican Party in Alabama leading up to the November elections. The head of the Alabama Republican Party, whose real name - I'm not making this up - is Twinkle Andress Cavanaugh, has recorded an audio clip being used in automated phone calls all over the state accusing 4 Democratic lawmakers of being captive to the "gay agenda" because one Democratic candidate for Congress there is a lesbian. Someone should remind them that the Alabama Republicans share a party with mouth-breathing moron Gerald Allen, who thinks that all books…

Dorky Poll: Science Power!

OK, the monkey business may have been a little too abstract for a good audience participation entry. So let's fall back on a classic: What science-related superpower would you most like to have? Because this is a Dorky Poll, "science-related superpower" here means a supernatural ability that is useful for doing science. Because battling crime is passé. Personally, I think I'd have to go with the ability to manipulate small objects remotely. I'm a big guy, and I have big hands, and you know what they say about big guys with big hands... That's right, they have a lot of trouble turning screws…

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2007

The weekend interrupted the parade of Nobel prizes, setting apart The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2007, more commonly called the Nobel in Economics (even though it's a late addition). This goes to three guys in the US, including the obligatory Chicagoan: Leonid Hurwicz, Eric S. Maskin, and Roger B. Myerson, "for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory." As the official press release puts it: Mechanism design theory, initiated by Leonid Hurwicz and further developed by Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson, has greatly enhanced our…

Occasional Random Pop Songs Post

I had a 9pm intramural hoops game last night (the other team didn't show, so we won by forfeit, but it still pushed bedtime back a bit), and I have an 8am meeting today, not to mention the beginning of a nasty head cold that is turning my brain to cotton wool. Sounds like a good day for a shuffle-play post. Below the fold, a good run of songs from the four-and-five-star playlist last night, to allow you to poke fun at my taste in pop music. "Happy Birthday To Me," Cracker "Always The Last To Know," Del Amitri "Whenever God Shines His Light," Van Morrison "Painless Life," Slender Means "See…

Sayonara

Well, Chad's back, and I guess that means that this guest-blogging stint has come to an end (free! I'm free!). I want to thank Chad again for the opportunity to play in his sandbox for a few weeks. I didn't get the chance to write every post I had planned. Real life -- or at least the closest academic imitation thereof -- does sometimes get in the way of blogging. Anyways, having seen it from the other side now, this blogging stuff isn't easy. I don't know how Chad manages to come up with two or more things to say every day, but I guess that's why he's the blogger and I'm the guest-blogger.…

Growing bolder in Boulder

Oh, to be young again and brave: I'm impressed with these high school students who protested the American loyalty oath to a god: About 50 Boulder High School students walked out of class Thursday to protest the daily reading of the Pledge of Allegiance and recited their own version, omitting "one nation, under God." The students say the phrase violates the constitutional separation of church and state. Back in my high school days, I simply quietly refused to say the pledge, and didn't make an issue of it. It's a sign of progress that now students will make their protests loud and unavoidable…

Endangered Scientists

It's really difficult to come up with new ways to frame crisis stories about the dwindling number of science majors in the US, but people keep finding them. The latest is from Marc Zimmer writing in Inside Higher Ed, who makes a number of biology analogies: The numbers indicate that the American scientist population is not healthy, especially not in comparison to scientists in other countries. This will impact America's ability to retain its place in the global (scientific and technological) food chain. What could be responsible for this decline? My money is on the changing habitat of the…

Student Report: Neurogenesis, where have you been?

Hello again! It's amazing the things that are going on right under our noses (undergraduate noses that is). I was wondering why we can continue to form so many memories in a life time with no new cell growth after a specific age. If every memory is a new reconstruction of interacting neurons firing off with each other, wouldn't we need new cells eventually so that the others can maintain function? I suppose this isn't too unrealistic with billions of neurons and trillions of connections, but the idea of neurogenesis sure explains a lot. According to a recent article from BioED,…

The AV Club on Dawkins

The Onion AV Club has a review of The God Delusion this week. "Big deal, " you say, "Who cares what a humor magazine thinks?" I've found in recent years, though, that the AV Club is one of the most consistent sources of reviews of movies, music, and books out there. They're sharp, they get right to the point (reviews are seldom more than a few paragraphs), and they're a reliable predictor of my reaction to a book, record, or movie. It's a three-paragraph review, so it would seem cheap to quote it at length, but here are the opening sentences: Without a doubt, contributing to the public…

Element 116 and 118

Both the AIP and the New York Times are reporting that elements 116 and 118 have been discovered by a collaboration between Russian and American scientists working at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna. This is the second time it's been announced that element 118 has been seen, as a previous "discovery" turned out to be fraudulent, but everybody who comments in those articles says that they're confident this one is the real thing. The elements in question, which nobody has attempted to attach names to yet (have they learned nothing from the Planet Wars? Name one after a tv…

Carnivalia, and an open thread

It's late, I'm going to be unconscious in my bed, those of you with insomnia or living in distant time zones need something to chat about — so here, just for you, it's a Pharyngula Late Night open thread, primed with a few fun carnivals. Oekologie #9 Friday Ark #156 Carnival of the Godless Carnival of the Liberals #47 Skeptics' Circle #69 What's that? It's not enough? Late night chats need something really weird to keep them lively? OK, here, how about Creation Ministries International. Be sure to read their "What we believe" page — this is the Christianity everybody assures me…

Global Climate Phase Shift

After three glorious sixty-degree days in California, we returned to Schenectady just in time for a major winter storm. In mid-April. There's an inch or two of icy slush all over everything, and it's still raining. Whee! It occurs to me again that what we're seeing locally from climate change feels more like a climate phase shift than a consistent warming. Yeah, December was really warm, but March and April have been cold and shitty. Summer extended well into September last year, but it didn't really get started until July-- teeth were chattering at our commencement ceremony last year in mid-…

Experiment Thoughts

Since I'll be using PZMyer's lab, I'll have access to plenty of zebra fish. As per being in his Neurobiology course, I get to design my own experiment. Zebra fish are schooling fish. If they are isolated, I wonder if finding another fish would be their top priority. Would it be high enough that they would navigate a few turns to find? Would it be higher priority than food? It looks like I may be testing the power of a social reward. Some other random thoughts: In class, we bounced the idea that deer are the perfect example of depression and suicidal tendencies in the wild. Who else…

More Problems with SAT Writing Test

Inside Higher Ed provides another example of an essay receiving a perfect score on the SAT writing test: In the 1930's, American businesses were locked in a fierce economic competition with Russian merchants for fear that their communist philosophies would dominate American markets. As a result, American competition drove the country into an economic depression and the only way to pull them out of it was through civil cooperation. American president Franklin Delenor Roosevelt advocated for civil unity despite the communist threat of success by quoting "the only thing we need to fear is itself…

Iain (M.) Banks Interviewed

Speaking (as we were) of the glamourour life of writers, Bookslut points to an interview with Iain Banks. If you're not familiar with Banks, he's a prolific author who alternates "mainstream" literary novels (as "Iain Banks") with genre SF novels (as "Iain M. Banks"). With a very few exceptions, his books are very smart, fairly bloody, and darkly comic. He apparently sells very well in the UK, but hasn't really managed to crack the US market, to the point where his most recent SF novel (The Algebraist) is only available from a small press. It's a shame, because he's written some absolutely…

Evolution Sunday

Kate passes along a link to a New Scientist article noting this today has been proclaimed Evolution Sunday 2007 by the Clergy Letter Project: On 11 February 2007 hundreds of congregations from all portions of the country and a host of denominations will come together to discuss the compatibility of religion and science. For far too long, strident voices, in the name of Christianity, have been claiming that people must choose between religion and modern science. More than 10,000 Christian clergy have already signed The Clergy Letter demonstrating that this is a false dichotomy. Now, on…

Six Degrees of Wikipedia

Travis at Arcane Gazebo suggests a game: Six Degrees of Wikipedia Go to Wikipedia. Click the random article link in the sidebar. Open a second random article in another tab. Try to find a chain of links (as short as possible) starting from the first article that leads to the second. Lacking other bloggy inspiration, I tried it out. My two pages to connect were Kings Contrivance, Columbia, Maryland and Home Alone (video game), because God hates me. I did find a chain between them, though: Kings Contrivance, Columbia, Maryland Planned Community United States Cinema of the United States List…

What's the Matter with Wisconsin?

Inside Higher Ed reports on an impressively bad idea from the upper midwest: "If we can't lure them here, let's tether them here," said Mark O'Connell, executive director of the Wisconsin Counties Association, a lobbying organization, and a member of the Commission on Enhancing the Mission of the Wisconsin Colleges, a group created to advise the network of 13 two-year colleges in the state.The commission, appointed by the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin Colleges in August, submitted a report late last month calling for an investment in new scholarships pegged to residency…

links for 2008-11-08

Study finds many motorists don't see need to heed speed limits A result that will surprise approximately nobody with a driver's license. (tags: social-science news law silly) Better Late Than Never?: Titanic | The A.V. Club "If only every woman in the world was periodically forced to choose between two fantastically beautiful men--one rich and civilized yet stuffy, and one poor but free and capable. Then we wouldn't have to keep seeing that plotline over and over again, because everyone would be so bored from dealing with it in real life that it wouldn't be the stuff of clichéd dreams…

Student Post: Imagining Tennis

I read an interesting article in the New Yorker the other day. It followed the research of neuroscientist Adrian Owen and his work on patients in vegetative states. In some patients, when he gave the verbal command to "imagine you are playing tennis," their brain regions lit up on an fMRI indistinguishably from your average walking, talking, and recognizably conscious human being asked to perform the same task. Moreover, the patients were able to sustain this activity (so presumably the tennis imagination) for over thirty seconds suggesting some degree of focus. The article goes on to…

Fear the (Quantum) Turtle

The Pontiff beat me to it, but my Ph.D. alma mater has scored a $12.5 million grant from the NSF to fund the Joint Quantum Institute as a Physics Frontier Center for the development of quantum technology: The Physics Frontier Center (PFC) award, effective September 1, will fund 17 graduate students, seven postdoctoral scientists and seven undergraduates as well as an extensive and highly cross-disciplinary research program under the general title Processing Quantum Coherence. Ultimately the work may lead to development of a computer that exploits the strange phenomena of quantum mechanics…

Thursday Baby Blogging 082808

Here's your scaled baby picture for the week: OK, "scaled" isn't entirely appropriate, as I haven't bothered to keep Appa a constant size in these, but it is the weekly picture of SteelyKid with her standard reference bison. She continues to grow at an impressive rate, thanks to inheriting her father's appetite. Kate's been making a point to be extra careful about seeing that she doesn't swallow air, and burping her during and after feedings, so we've avoided any colicky outbursts for three nights running, hallelujah! She did fuss a little at the 3 am feeding last night, perhaps out of…

Memo to Windows Vista

To: Windows Vista From: Chateau Steelypips Please note that when I change your settings, I do it for a reason. You do not need to be aware of the reason, just know that there is one. In particular, when I change the "Windows Update" setting to something other than "Install updates and automatically restart any damn fool time you please," that means that I do not want you to install updates and restart unless I specifically tell you to do so. I don't care how "critical" the updates are, I don't care how many days it's been since the last time I updated-- I'm the one who decides when you…

links for 2008-02-06

WD5 most likely missed Mars, but we may never know - The Planetary Society Blog | The Planetary Society The asteroid is now officially lost. (tags: astronomy planets space science) Saint Gasoline » Blog Archive » The Allegory of the Trolley Problem Paradox Or, Why You Shouldn't Major in Philosophy (tags: comics humanities silly) My Own Kind of Freedom: A Firefly Novel by Steven Brust -- The Dream Café Steve Brust's Firefly novel, under a CC license. It's more Firefly than Brust, but still quite good. (tags: books SF television) Letters from the Past, A PRL Retrospective "As part of…

Darth Vader vs. My Dog

The Paper of Record reports on a science debate, of sorts: On one side of a vaunted cultural divide were Doug Liman, director of the coming movie "Jumper," about a young man who discovers he can transport himself anywhere he wants just by thinking about it, and Hayden Christensen, the film's star. On the other were a pair of the institute's physics professors, Edward Farhi and Max Tegmark, experts on the type of physics the movie was purporting to portray, who had been enlisted to view a few scenes from it and talk about science. On the one hand, I find this Physics of Star Trek sort of…

Google-Bomb the Debates

Steinn offers an excellent suggestion, after noticing that CNN is soliciting debate questions from random people on the Internet: Keith over at NASAwatch suggested his reader swamp it with NASA policy questions to try to get one into the actual debate. Scienceblog readers could do the same - send in a lot of good, coherent, concise question on science policy and closely related issues. Lots of questions. Just do it. Don't talk about it, don't dither. Pick a question that you think is important and interesting, on science, for this debate, and send it in. They can still ignore the science…

Memo to ESPN

Yo, E! (Do you mind if I call you E?) I'd like to draw your attention to an item on your web page: NY Giants 21, Dallas Cowboys 17. Yeah, shocking as it may seem, the Giants won that game. Go figure. Hey, it surprised me, and I'm a Giants fan! Still, in light of that item, doesn't it seem odd that 90% of your coverage of the game has been about Dallas? Which is to say, about the loser Cowboys? D'you think you could, I don't know, run some items about the New York Football Giants who, after all, won the game? (And why do we play? That's right, Mr. Edwards, we play to win the game. A gold star…

Mixed Nuts

I took a much-needed Luddite Day yesterday, shutting down the computer and spending the afternoon loafing on the couch reading. I had meant to have a new stereo installed in my car and do some Christmas shopping while I waited, but we got a moderately significant snowstorm yesterday afternoon, so I pushed the installation and shopping back to today, rather than waiting for the roads to get really bad and then trying to come home from the mall. This means I'll be spending today doing some Christmas shopping while my car stereo is upgraded. So it'll be a day of open threads, a serious one to…

Fan Mail

"Hey, dude, what's in the box?" "You know, I've asked you to stop calling me that. You should show some respect, since I'm the only one of the two of us who has opposable thumbs." "Whatever. What's in the box? Is it for me?" "Amazingly, yes, it is. It's a rawhide bone." "Oooh! People love me!" "Yes they do. In this case, it's from Mike, who was my thesis student last year." "The one with the camera?" "Yeah, he did take a lot of pictures. He's in grad school now, at the University of Connecticut, and when he heard about the book, he sent you a bone by way of congratulations." "We always did…

What Physics Topics Would You Like to Read About?

I had intended to write up a recent paper for ResearchBlogging today, but I cleverly forgot to bring either the hard copy of the PDF home last night, which wrecked that plan. And I've got real lab work to do today, so it's not happening at work. This seems like a good opportunity, though, to ask if there are things I ought to be explaining here that haven't occurred to me for one reason or another. So, as the post title says: What topics in physics or related areas would you like me to write about here? This could be a recent paper, something from a recent news story ("I heard these guys in…

Not Everything Is About CO_2

Climate change is a major crisis, don't get me wrong, and it's something that needs to be discussed extensively in both scientific and policy circles. We're pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at rather too high a rate, and getting something done about that is a key priority. It's possible, though, to take the obsession on climate and CO_2 a little too far, though. Such as this news story from Physics World: A cosmic gamma-ray burst striking the Earth could be harmful to ocean plankton at depths of up to 75 m, according to a team of Cuban researchers. These organisms account for up to…