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Antarctica: Others Think I'd do a Helluva Job, Too

Since I have recently developed quite a history of visiting cold and snowy places, often during the winter, I wish to preserve that tradition. I am competing for the opportunity to go to Antarctica in February 2010 -- a dream adventure that I've always wanted to pursue (and almost did pursue when I was an undergraduate researching Fin Whales and Crabeater Seals at the University of Washington). To enter, all candidates must publish a picture of themselves and write an essay explaining why we think we are the best choice, and solicit votes from the public. Whomever receives the most votes wins…

Lunch in Helsinki, 2

tags: lunch, food, Ravintola Helsinge, Tekniikan Museo, travel, Helsinki, Finland Coffee and Lunch (croissant with cheese, tomato and "rocket", a tangy green that I've never seen nor heard of before now) Photographed at Ravintola Helsinge, the cafe on the grounds shared with the Tekniikan Museo (Technology Museum), Helsinki, Finland. Image: GrrlScientist, 6 July 2009 [larger view]. (raw image) I am recovering, albeit slowly, from jet lag. This process is made more difficult because my sleep patterns had been seriously disturbed for several weeks before I left NYC, and further complicated…

Witch Hunter Watch

Peter Sinclair has a good run down of recent politically motivated FOIA fishing expeditions into climate and other scientist emails. It includes mention of the recent good news in the ATI v UVa case where the court agreed with UVa that the ATI and their lawyers could not be trusted to see emails UVa has claimed should be exempt from the FOIA request for the purpose of challenging that excemption. Ouch. But good call, I am sure. Peter also includes mention of an excellent non-climate science related example of the same tactic in the case of a Wisconsin history professor, William Cronon,…

A smattering of news from the wicked world of religion

I'm in Vegas, I'm at the Amaz!ng Meeting, I'm distracted by all the shiny flashy lights and all the strange people who want to talk to me, so you're all going to have to talk among yourselves for a while. Here are a few news items to prime the pump. Don't read this one until after breakfast. It's the sad case of Ondrej Mauerova, a young boy kept imprisoned and tortured by a weird Czech cult. I don't even want to say any more about it. In a less malevolent but even more catastrophic cult failure, Neil Beagley, a 16 year old Oregon boy, has died because his family only believes in "faith…

Fatal work injury that killed J.D. Jorgensen was preventable, Iowa-OSHA cites JRS Excavating

Justin ‘J.D.’ Jorgensen’s work-related death could have been prevented. That’s how I see the findings of Iowa OSHA in the agency’s recent citations against his employer, JRS Excavating. The 30 year-old was working with a crew in a residential area in Altoona, IA. They were digging water and sewer lines. Mr. Jorgensen was inside a 10 to 12 feet deep trench when it collapsed on him. I wrote about the incident shortly after it occurred in January 2016. Inspectors with IA-OSHA conducted an inspection at the construction site following the fatal incident. The agency issued citations to JRS…

2013 Enlightener & Deceiver Awards

Dan Josefsson: Enlightener of the Year 2013 The Swedish Skeptics have announced their annual awards for 2013. The Enlightener of the Year award is given to Dan Josefsson for his book Mannen som slutade ljuga, "The Man Who Stopped Lying", and his documentary film Kvinnan bakom Thomas Quick, "The Woman Behind Thomas Quick". Both describe the outlandish Freudian cult around psychoanalyst Margit Norell and how her ideas about repressed memory therapy caused an incarcerated junkie to confess over thirty murders and become convicted for eight despite a complete lack of forensic evidence. He has…

Going to Minnesota

Less than a month now! Dear Aard readers Heather Flowers and Erin Emmerich of the University of Minnesota have invited me to speak there in April. My wife will accompany me and interpret whenever we run into someone who speaks only Mandarin. Now, Dear Reader: can you offer me further Minnesota speaking gigs to help fund the trip? Pointers to Scandy associations that I should contact? I could speak about pretty much anything Scandy, not just archaeology. Heather has already given me an awesome contact list. Update 13 March: I'm bumping this entry along month by month to gather more reader…

KattCon Gaming Convention

I spent Friday and Saturday with Junior at a small gaming convention in Katrineholm, a town two hours' drive from my home. (I stayed nearby in May of last year with my wife.) With less than 100 participants, not all of whom were there at the same time, it was a friendly and welcoming con where it felt like our presence made a difference. Here's what I played: Descent, a dungeon game very reminiscent of 70s Dung & Drag when everything was still combat-centric and no role-playing asked for. Fun game though the underground catacombs full of magically appearing monsters of course have no…

Three New Halls at Jelling

One of the most beloved novels in the Swedish language is Frans G. Bengtsson's Viking story Röde Orm (1941), transl. Red Orm / The Long Ships (1943). And one of the most beloved scenes in the novel are the Yuletide celebrations at the court of King Harold Bluetooth at Jelling in Jutland toward the end of the 10th century. It's got the lines "There's thyme in it, said Toki in a cracked voice" and "He's done pissing now", and a duel that ends in a man's severed head landing in a tub of mead. (You can see why Bengtsson is one of my favourite writers.) I recently complained about Skalk running…

Tech Note: Help Me Choose a Smartphone

Four years ago (when I had only been blogging for a month) I asked my readers what kind of smartphone I should get. Nobody replied, but I got some advice elsewhence and bought a Qtek 9100. Then, two years ago, I asked the same question again and got lots of answers. In the end I bought a Samsung SGH-i780 that has served me well since. I'd like to get away from Windows Mobile while there's still an aftermarket for the Samsung, so here I go again, asking you, Dear Reader, for advice. Here are the specs I'm aiming for. Cell phone connectivity Wifi connectivity that actually allows me to connect…

Science guy harshes creationists' mellow

I'm a Bill Nye fan, so it was good to learn that he's not reluctant to point out the foolishness of creationists. The Emmy-winning scientist angered a few audience members when he criticized literal interpretation of the biblical verse Genesis 1:16, which reads: “God made two great lights — the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars.” He pointed out that the sun, the “greater light,” is but one of countless stars and that the “lesser light” is the moon, which really is not a light at all, rather a reflector of light. A number of…

Skamby Visit, Farewell to Daub

It's always bittersweet to return to sites you've dug. I guess I'm particularly susceptible to this nostalgia since I tend to feel it very shortly after moving on from anything or any place. And since I usually only dig during the sunny season I remember my old excavations as summer country. Two days ago I checked in with the boat inhumation cemetery at Skamby in Kuddby parish, Ãstergötland. Me & Howard Williams and his students dug there in 2005. The turf and flora have regenerated nicely over our trench and a flock of broad-snouted sheep now grazes on the cemetery hill. They seem to…

Labour leadership: Party wins appeal against voting rules

A local kerfuffle. The apparently-determined-to-tear-itself-apart Labour party got taken to the courts by some of its members who didn't like a decision the NEC - the party's governing body - had made, in respect of the rules for who was eligible to vote in the upcoming leadership contest. My preferred response from the courts would have been "we will only intervene in the internal affairs of a political party (or indeed, any other organisation) when there is a clear and obvious need to do so, and when a clear and obvious error or injustice has been committed; and in this case, clearly, the…

The ETS is stupid, part n + 1

I don't think I've insulted the ETS recently but the Tata Steel brouhaha provides yet another excuse. Emil Dimantchev, also a climate policy analyst with Thomson Reuters, said membership of the EU emissions trading scheme (ETS) had delivered Tata Steel’s European operations a £780m windfall through the over-allocation of carbon credits between 2008 and 2014. In estimates that Dimantchev considers conservative, the Port Talbot works alone received more than £239m over that period. Source: Graun. And that's the ETS for you: a scheme so badly designed that something that should have helped…

The RSS Middle Tropospheric Temperature Now V4.0

Old news now, of course, but there's a blog post by Carl Mears with nice pix and explanation. Notice this is TMT, not TLT, but at this point we're largely arguing about the differences between the different groups, and its fine for that. It is, of course, all nicely published in proper style. By contrast, UAH version 6.0 (ahem, beta) was announced most of a year ago and is still not actually a paper, as far as I know. It would be hard for it to be; they're now on beta 5. Don't miss me snarking about how crap their code is. Reading the "beta 5" I'm struck by how ad-hoc the changes seem to be…

Mountain unicycling and fluid dynamics

At the "lookout" in Bracknell. Bracknell gets a bad press, and the center is indeed horrible, but it has nice paths for walkers and quite a decent bit of woodland. Where I saw my first ever mountain-bike unicycle. I didn't see anyone riding it, but they did have a lot of pads. Inside, they had this rather nice fluid-dynamics toy: a perspex cylinder about 1/2m wide and 2m high, with a circulation about the vertical axis imposed by the water flowing in at the top. And a valve you could turn, that did something slightly unspecified, but which we're fairly sure was to change the speed of…

Green aeroplanes, ho ho

A mind-bogglingly stupid article in the Times came my way. Someone has built a small aeroplane powered by batteries. So far nothing exciting. But then to report the claim Ms Lavrand said that the fuel cost per hour of the Electra was â¬1 (70p) compared with about â¬60 for an equivalent petrol-driven machine. The motor and batteries will cost between â¬10,000 and â¬15,000, about the same as existing small petrol engines. I don't believe that a 25 hp engine would be anything like â¬10,000, nor that the fuel price disparity could be a factor of 60 - it should be the same as for electric/petrol…

A Lot On My Plate

Feels like I've got a bit too much on my plate right now. Tonight's boardgame night, so I need to get everything packed up before dinner. "Pack up what?", I hear you say. Well, I'm spending the next couple of days digging & sieving test pits in a cave near Enköping where a Bronze Age spearhead has been found. While I'm there I'm also going to do half a day or so of renewed metal detecting at one of the hoard sites that proved non-productive back in April. The farmer has ploughed and harrowed the spot so new stuff may have emerged up into detector reach. During fieldwork I also have to…

West African Marabout Con Man

Marabouts are West African con men & fortune tellers who market their services in Europe with little flyers printed on coloured paper. In France, there's an ongoing collectors' craze for these notes. I found one under my windshield wiper the other day. I translate: Mr Seeki Fortune teller, international marabout Born with spiritual power. I am known worldwide. I can solve all your problems e.g. love, health, family problems, business, legal issues, financial transactions, weight loss. You learn how to protect yourself and your family from the enemy and how you get your near and dear…

Labour aims high on CO2 reduction to avoid backbench revolt?

So says... yes you guessed, its the Guardian again. My first thought was, oh how typical, not "because its right", but for electoral reasons. But thats probably wrong thinking: if the grass roots are pushing for it, then splendid. However... the details are poor (there is a little bit more here. The bill will set out a statutory commitment to cut CO2 emissions by 60% from 1990 levels by 2050, requiring annual cuts way above anything the Labour government has achieved so far. 2050 is a fair way off (to be fair rolling 5 year targets of an unknown value are also suggested)... and cuts way…

CO2 airbourne fraction

http://www.gci.org.uk/briefings/rising_risk.pdf asserts that the "airbourne fraction" of CO2 is coming up to 100%, having been 50%: The point of great concern here is that over the last couple few years 2003/4/5 the rate of increase has jumped to nearer 3 ppmv per annum. This gives a loading of the atmosphere by weight that is roughly equal to not half but all the emissions from fossil fuel burning. As far as I can see this is wrong. In 2003/4 growth rates were 2+ ppmv and heading downwards. But the main point of this post was to inquire if anyone knows where the 2005 data is hiding. I can…

Watt's so interesting about that?

Anthony Watt's blog seems to be a rather high profile climate sceptic site that usually seems to at least try to have substantive content, but I can't see watt's so interesting about this article from The Province, a BC, Canadian newspaper. The article starts off with this remarkable statement: As evidence to the contrary started rolling in and one prominent scientist after another abandoned ship, the global warming brigade lost much of its sizzle in the past year. I think I can guess what he thinks is "evidence to the contrary", probably the supposed huge temeprature drop this year, the […

Most Bizarre ID Quote Ever?

Nick Matzke highlights a quote from a new book by Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt of the Discovery Institute that is simply stunning in its absurdity. According to them, not only did Darwin undermine morality and cause every evil thing imaginable, he also undermined our ability to count: Strange though it may seem to neo-Darwinists, Darwin's assumption that the terms species and variety are merely given for convenience's sake is part of a larger materialist and reductionist program that undercuts the natural foundation of counting and distorts the natural origin of mathematics. To put it…

San Diego's Gay Pride Parade

Agape Press has a column full of great wailing and gnashing of teeth over the San Diego City Council issing a proclamation welcoming the 25th annual gay pride parade in that town, an event that brings some 100,000 people into the city to spend lots of money. The column complains about things taking place that are "too offensive to describe in print" and in the middle there is a link to pictures from the parade, in between two warnings in big red capital letters proclaiming: CAUTION! THESE ARE VERY GRAPHIC IMAGES! Here's the link. Go look at those pictures and see if you can see anything "too…

Is This a Parody?

The fact that it's not all that easy to tell should frighten us. If it wasn't in The Onion, I'm not sure we'd know: In a decisive 1-0 decision Monday, President Bush voted to grant the president the constitutional power to grant himself additional powers. "As president, I strongly believe that my first duty as president is to support and serve the president," Bush said during a televised address from the East Room of the White House shortly after signing his executive order. "I promise the American people that I will not abuse this new power, unless it becomes necessary to grant myself the…

Is Van Till an Apostate?

There is an amusing thread going on over at Dembski's blog concerning the religious views of Howard Van Till, who recently made available this speech that he gave to the West Michigan Freethought Association. Howard is a friend and a fellow board member of Michigan Citizens for Science; he is also an emeritus professor of astronomy and physics at Calvin College, a theologically conservative Christian university. Dembski wonders whether Van Till should be an emeritus professor since his religious views have strayed so far from Calvinist theology. That question doesn't concern me a bit. Howard…

Rosenhouse Shreds Cordova's Argument

Jason Rosenhouse has a thorough and devestating takedown of Sal Cordova's recent post at Dembski's blog about redundancy as proof of ID. I especially like this part: Hard as it is to believe, Salvador is actually arguing that redundancy in complex systems is what signals design. Which is amusing, since the main weapon in the ID arsenal, irreducible complexity, is based entirely on the idea that it is lack of redundnacy that signals design. A structure is said to be irreducibly complex if it has several well-matched parts, such that the removal of any one part causes the system to cease…

Weakest Argument Against Gay Marriage

This may be the weakest argument against gay marriage I've heard: And Professor Robert George, a Princeton University constitutional scholar and co-founder of the Religious Coalition for Marriage, points to another danger to be avoided. In a recent Associated Press interview, he noted that if homosexual marriage is legalized, individuals who believe in traditional marriage could be treated as bigots and their religious views on homosexual marriage could be subject to attack -- and possibly even prosecution. Okay, and? Imagine this argument being used against interracial marriage - "If…

Amar on Congressional Searches

Akhil Amar, one of the very best constitutional scholars in the nation, has an essay at Slate about the controversy over the FBI's search of the office of a congressman in a criminal investigation. He says pretty much exactly what I've been saying since the day it happened, that the only problem with the search was procedural, not constitutional. The speech and debate clause, contrary to the assertions of Hastert and Pelosi, do not protect a legislator against arrest or against having their office searched as part of a felony investigation. The procedural mistake the FBI made was in not…

Balkin on Congressional Outrage at FBI

Jack Balkin pretty much nails the hypocrisy of Hastert and Pelosi and the other Congressmen throwing a fit about the raid on Jefferson's office: The Bush Administration has, over the past six years, detained American citizens without any of the protections of the Bill of Rights, engaged in cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees, imposed new forms of secrecy to insulate itself from oversight both by the Press and by Congress, used the state secrets privilege to shut down any investigation into its mistreatment of detainees, hid and prevaricated about the evidence justifying, the…

Rowe on Dembski and the Founders

I was busy yesterday with other things, so I sent this post to Jon Rowe to give it the good fisking it deserves. He obliged. In short, Dembski attempted, weakly. to answer Judge Jones' statements about the founding fathers making reason the arbiter of religious claims. His answer didn't really answer that assertion, but he appeared to think that it did. Jon rightly points out that Judge Jones' statements were quite accurate. He quoted one long passage from Adams, but could have chosen many others. The one that comes to mind immediately is Jefferson's advice to his nephew: Fix reason firmly in…

Funniest Quote Ever?

It's gotta be in the running. Here's William Dembski commenting on Allen MacNeill's upcoming course on ID at Cornell University: Dembski, a former professor at Southern Seminary in Louisville, doubts the course will accurately portray intelligent design. "Given that I regard myself as a fair-minded person -- and given that I understand the professor of the class has called me a bald-faced liar -- I would guess that [it's] probably not going to be a fair treatment," Dembski offers. "But who knows?" And of course, Dembski would be the authority on honest and fair treatment, wouldn't he? After…

Paulos Column

John Allen Paulos' column at ABC News is up and it's quite interesting. In addition to his link to this blog concerning the Liberty University debate team, he also discusses a survey that shows that an enormous percentage of Americans have a negative opinion of atheists more than any other group: Asked whether they would disapprove of a child's wish to marry an atheist, 47.6 percent of those interviewed said yes. Asked the same question about Muslims and African-Americans, the yes responses fell to 33.5 percent and 27.2 percent, respectively. The yes responses for Asian-Americans, Hispanics,…

More Lawyer Jokes

Well, OK, it's really another of those stories about a cut-up judge, who, in this case, issued an order compelling Defendant's counsel to accept the Plaintiff's counsel's lunch invitation: There are a number of fine restaurants within easy driving distance of both counsel's offices, e.g., Christopher's, Vincent's, Morton's, Donovan's, Bistro 24 at the Ritz-Carlton, The Arizona Biltmore Grill, Sam's Café (Biltmore location), Alexi's, Sophie's and, if either counsel has a membership, the Phoenix Country Club and the University Club. Counsel may select their own venue or, if unable to agree,…

The Physicist Trap

Mark Trodden has a post endorsing the BEC videogames at the University of Colordao's Physics 2000 project. These are a bunch of Java applets demonstrating different aspects of the laser cooling and trapping process. I used to link them from my blog on Steelypips, but in the move to ScienceBlogs, I dropped the "Geek Stuff" category of sidebar links. Still, I heartily agree with the recommendation to go try these out. They first put that site up back when I was in grad school, and somebody or another found the link and brought it up on the computer in the lab. If you read through the text, you'…

What I Do to Earn a Living

If you're wondering about the slow posting hereabouts, it's because I'm spending a lot of time on my classes. Having a day job sucks that way. I've mentioned before that I'm doing a senior-level elective class on Quantum Optics. This is very much an idiot experimentalist's approach to the material, but if you'd like a look at what I'm doing, here are my notes from the first four lectures (scanned into large PDF files, which I'm posting to the class Blackboard site, but will upload here as well, at least for a couple of classes): Lecture 1: Dirac notation, state vectors, operators as matrices…

"Breathtaking Inanity" Would Be a Great Album Title

I'm probably just about the last science blogger on Earth to note this, but the Dover Panda Trial decision was handed down today, and it's a doozy. I particularly like the summation: Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an…

North Korea 'may not be performance art', say experts

A classic from the Daily Mash: NORTH Korea is not an elaborate modern art installation, as previously suspected. As the tiny nation seemed to be genuinely threatening the United States with a nuclear strike, experts said it was now likely that Kim Jong Un and his late father are not ground-breaking surrealists in the mould of Salvador Dali, Luis Bunuel and Anne Widdecombe. Well, I liked it. Since I'm here: I haven't written on the Lewandowsky stuff before (I just copied someone else, mainly because I liked the cartoon) but it seems to have been getting sillier. mt seems to have it about…

Comparing radiation doses

This post is more an appeal for info than anything useful in itself. But I'll probably update it if I get anything. Fukushima refers. My question, in the context of the area around Fukushima that is contaminated by radioactivity, is how much is actually contaminated, in the sense of now having radioactivity levels higher than naturally occurs in granite-based areas like Cornwall? How much has been officially declared "contaminated" isn't a very interesting number In response, M points me to radioactivity.mext.go.jp/en/distribution map around FukushimaNPP/; here for example is July 2011 (take…

Oops #2

Spot the problem: So, my Top Tip is, Don't drop your camera onto a hard stone courtyard. Apparently http://www.fixationuk.com/ may be able to help (thanks Andrew). Another Top Tip might be learn from your mistakes but that is just too hard. In unrelated news, I finally got one of the coveted orange tee-shirts by running in the Cambrdige Fun Run round the Science Park. 7:04 which is quite passable, though it brought back the Old War Wound (those who kindly commented in rowing and running that I was probably fit enough to break myself were correct :-). In this pic, however (thanks William),…

Richard Dawkins, tune in on Friday!

I'm sure he will be looking forward to this: his funeral is going to be held tomorrow. Since the teaser calls him "one of the most wicked and vile human beings ever to walk the face of this earth", and since they've already done a hack job on Heath Ledger (in which they build a crude dummy of the actor and set it on fire), I have a sneaking suspicion that this won't consist of a reading of Dawkins' suggestion for his funeral. In fact, I don't think these hateful yahoos are capable of reading that; the examples on their website are less than eloquent. These are not your Southern gentlemen…

M1.25

A good outing tonight with the closest we've come to M1 so far - M1.25 perhaps. John-the-coach did an excellent job on us for the first leg then p*ss*d off to the pub when it started raining, which was probably fair enough because it was a real English summer thunderstorm and we all got soaked. Fortunately those of us who grew up in the Andy Nicol school of rowing (you f*ck*ng well square up early and your blade stays 2" above the saxboard whether the boat is down on your side or not) know enough to bring a change of clothes. And our first outing in the borrowed-for-the-bumps boat from First-…

This is CSR

We're branching out into new areas, see video. Certainly beats our video; and Broadcom's is even more boring, though they know how to dance. All of which is a preamble to noting that we're merging with SIRF. Or perhaps we're buying them. Who ya gonna trust - PC mag or the FT? Not a tricky one, that. Sez the FT, we're snapping up a US-based rival at a knockdown price... values the US group at about £91m ($136m), a 91 per cent premium to its share price. I'm not quite sure how come a 91% premium is a knock-down price, and I'm not giving any secrets away there as I really don't know. You can…

Pilloried again

You know the old T-shirt slogan: "Help the police. Beat yourself up". Anyway, Nurture have the traditional Inuit-imperilled-by-climate-change stuff, only its a bit more interesting because they link to a paper that actually tries to quantify the effects. Or it would be interesting, if not hidden behind a money wall. But I have my traditional response: when you're obliged to say things like But financial constraints are hindering the community. Insurance for expensive equipment, such as the snowmobiles the hunters need to use on the increasingly circuitous routes to the hunting grounds, is…

On Scientific Conferences, and Making Them Better

I've been doing a bunch of conferencing recently, what with DAMOP a few weeks ago and then Convergence last week. This prompted me to write up a couple of posts about conference-related things, which I posted over at Forbes. These were apparently a pretty bad fit for the folks reading over there, as they've gotten very little traffic relative to, well, everything else I've posted during that span. Live and learn. Anyway, I'm fairly happy with how both of those turned out, and on the off chance that they'll do better with the ScienceBlogs crowd, let me link them here: -- What Are Academic…

Terry Pratchett, RIP

Sir Terry Pratchett, author of some mind-boggling number of books, mostly the comic-fantasy Discworld series, died yesterday. He had been diagnosed with a kind of early-onset Alzheimer's back in 2007, a particularly cruel fate for a writer, but faced it with an impressive degree of grace, and kept writing almost to the end. And, indeed, somewhat past it. His work was a great comfort to me in some past bad times-- see this book review from 2001-- so his passing hits harder than for a lot of other authors. Not quite sure what to read to get past that... (Actually, that's not entirely true; I…

Ask Ethan #47: Do Science and Religion have to be at odds? (Synopsis)

“Ignorance is hardly unusual, Miss Davar. The longer I live, the more I come to realize that it is the natural state of the human mind. There are many who will strive to defend its sanctity and then expect you to be impressed with their efforts.” -Brandon Sanderson At the risk of inflaming everyone who doesn't think exactly like I do -- which is quite likely to literally be everyone who reads this -- sometimes I get a submission for Ask Ethan that I think is far too important to not address. And this week's entry, from Jonathan Hasey, really resonated with me. Image credit: Randall Munroe of…

Ask Ethan #44: What came first, black holes or galaxies? (Synopsis)

“One has to be an optimist; one has to hope that somewhere there’ll be new measurements to be made and that they will open up new vistas for us theorists to play with.” -Jim Peebles It was one of the most hotly contested questions for decades: we first expected and then found supermassive black holes at the centers of practically all large galaxies. But how did they get there? Image credit: KIPAC / SLAC / Stanford, via http://kipac.stanford.edu/kipac/research/agn. In particular, you could imagine it happening either way: either there was this top-down scenario, where large-scale structures…

What does alien life look like? (Synopsis)

“Since stars appear to be suns, and suns, according to the common opinion, are bodies that serve to enlighten, warm, and sustain a system of planets, we may have an idea of the numberless globes that serve for the habitation of living creatures.” -William Herschel When you look up at the stars in the night sky -- bright and dim, young and old, near and far -- can you help but wonder which ones of them might house life of any variety? And if so, how similar or different it might be from that on Earth? It's one of the greatest as-of-yet unanswered questions in all of science. Illustration…

Messier Monday: A Southern Sky Surprise, M80 (Synopsis)

“In a word, in the eyes of a giant, to whom our Suns were what our atoms are to us, the Milky Way would only look like a bubble of gas.” -Henri Poincaré When it comes to the wonders of the night sky, it seems like no matter what direction you look in, if you peer far enough, you're bound to see something distant, exotic and wonderful. But the Messier catalogue is special for exactly the opposite reason: these are the brightest, most prominent objects as seen from our corner of the Universe. Image credit: Jim Mazur’s Astrophotography via Skyledge, at http://www.skyledge.net/Messier80.htm.…