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Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?

asks Unscientific American (and CP). The short answer is no. As you can find from the FAO, calories per day are going up, not down. [W]orld grain prices in the spring and summer of last year climbed to the highest level ever. says USciAm - but somehow can't find space to mention that since then food prices have crashed to far below the 2008 average, and below the 2007 average, and remained stable in 2009. Now it took me 5 minutes and google to find that, can it be that Lester R Brown might be a teensy bit one-sided? The new idea seems to be, if people won't worry about GW for themselves,…

Obama on Palin, and other random trash

Via dubious sources, I've just discovered thedailymash, and Obama defends 'creationist psycho bitch' remark in particular. Their take on the US housing crisis is good, too. There's even a bit aboutGW. On a more techie note, I came in at the facebook article before my technical lead directed me to the Lib Dems political plans. But I found this all by myself. Sorry: I went to public school, you know. Meanwhile, from cyrolist, it seems the UKMO is interested in ice shelves: Polar Ice Sheet Modelling Scientist Salary: GBP 25,500 + competitive benefits including Civil Service Pension. Permanent…

Friends of the Earth has a campaign to reduce CO2 emission limits for cars

I've been on hols again - life is tough when you have kids - and am working my way through the backlog. I find... Friends of the Earth has a campaign to reduce CO2 emission limits for cars. Apparently: * In October 2008 the European Parliament is to vote to adopt the European Commission's proposed regulation on CO2 emission limits. * The proposed limit for new cars registered in the EU is to be 130g CO2 / km instead of the existing 160g CO2 / km. * BUT Friends of the Earth believes that 130g / km is not enough and is campaigning for a more restrictive limit of 120g CO2 / km with further…

Every step you take, every move you make...

...we'll be watching you. Bluetooth, that is. At least according to the rather over-hyped Bluetooth is watching: secret study gives Bath a flavour of Big Brother. I don't have a lot of sympathy. If you go around shouting out "Hello my name is Eric Fertang" then you shouldn't complain if people listen. Top quote: "This is yet another example of moronic use of privacy concerns," said Simon Davies, director of Privacy International, an independent campaigning group defending personal privacy (err, well no, not quite: he actually said "technology" not "privacy concerns", but I know what he meant…

Take a ride on Denial!

Inferno is back at it at Denial Depot, and as always it is good for more than a few laughs!  I particularily enjoyed this comment he/she added in the thread under the latest post on artic ice: Although that said, Earth's polar axis of rotation has only been reliably observed during the last 30 years of accurate satellite measurements, which as any credible climate denier will tell is is a mere drop in the ocean of Earth's thousands of years climate history. It's far too short to draw any conclusions from. So we must admit that long ago as 1900 the Earth may have rotated top to bottom instead…

More on macht

After writing that last post, I decided to have a look at the comments to macht's essay. I found another delightful instance of macht being clueless. Commenter Daniel wrote: “if some modern scientist happened to introduce something supernatural into science and it was testable” See, I don't get this - ID keeps missing the point, that it's impossible to simultaneously use supernatural explanations and have those explanations be testable. How can you test miracles and magic?? Good question. Here's macht's answer: For those of you who have been following my posts lately, this is an…

Physics Blogging Round-Up: Gravity, Pigeonholes, Groundhogs, and Weirdness

A long-ish stretch of time, but I was basically offline for a bunch of that because I needed to finish a chapter I was asked to contribute to an academic book. So there are only four physics posts from Forbes to promote this time: -- 'The Expanse' Is A Rare Sci-Fi Show That Gets Simulated Gravity Right: Another post on the SyFy adaptation of "James S. A. Corey"'s books, talking about a nifty bit of visual effects that nods at the Coriolis force you'd see on a rotating space station. -- What Is The Quantum Pigeonhole Principle And Why Is It Weird?: A paper published in the Proceedings of the…

100/366: Indomitable Spirit

As noted a couple of days ago, this was a big martial arts week at Chateau Steelypips, with The Pip's first-ever belt test on Monday, and SteelyKid testing for her brown belt tonight. Unfortunately, tonight was also a first, namely the first belt test she's failed. This was, sadly, entirely predictable, as her teacher has really tightened the requirements for tests of late, and said a while back that they would be required to do not only the form for the belt they were testing for, but the previous belt, as well. And I've been trying for three days to get her to run through the red-belt form…

030/366: Liquid Optics

It's rained fairly steadily for the last couple of days, which is to be expected. This also sent me to the back yard in hopes of getting a very particular effect for the photo of the day, that I had seen on a poster from the APS's student photo contest a few years ago: Water drops on the canopy on our deck, with little inverted images of the back yard. Here you see a large-aperture shot of drops of water hanging off the edge of the canopy over the patio table on our deck. The drops are in focus, but the rest of the yard is blurred out. If you look closely at the drops, though, you can see…

Physics Blogging Round-Up: Condensed Matter, Dew, Football, Cameras, and Movies

Another collection of posts over at my blog for Forbes: -- Wormholes, Monopoles, And Weyl Fermions: Making Exotic Physics Inside Ordinary Matter: A sort of deep background look at what makes condensed matter cool. Drawing heavily on Jimmy Williams's talk at the Schrodinger Sessions. -- Why Does My Car Change Color In The Morning?: SteelyKid pointed out that my car appeared paler than normal in the morning, and explaining why suggested a quick optical physics post. -- Football Physics: Nobody Catches The Ball At Its Highest Point: My Giants frittered away a lead against the Falcons over the…

008/366: Constraints

I'm playing around with the various camera lenses I own, which include a rarely-used fixed 50mm focal length. This is "rarely used" because a good deal of what I use the camera for is taking pictures of the kids, and the separation needed to get them in frame with this lens is really difficult to maintain. The cool thing about it is that it has a really large aperture, so you can get an extremely narrow depth of field, which makes for some cool focus effects. The lack of zoom capability is a bit of a challenge, in that if you want to frame a shot a particular way, you need to physically walk…

006/366: Eponymous

Today's photo-of-the-day is of the point that gives my home town of Whitney Point its name- the Tioughnioga (left) and Otselic (right) rivers come together here, providing as good a reason as any to locate a town here back in the late 1700's. This was originally named "Patterson's Point"; Whitney was an innkeeper who ran a mail drop, and people inevitably got sick of addressing things to "Whitney's Inn at Patterson's Point," so the name got condensed. There's a dam on the Otselic now (for values of "now" dating back to before WWII-- it was started as a New Deal labor project), and my parents…

The Birth of BEC

I'm massively short on sleep today, and wasn't going to blog until I saw somebody on Facebook mention that June 5th 1995 is the date of record for the first Bose-Einstein condensate at JILA in Boulder. I couldn't let that pass, so I wrote it up for Forbes: Twenty years ago, in the summer of 1995, I was a young grad student having just finished my second year at Maryland, and one morning I packed into the conference room at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg (where I worked in the group of Bill Phillips) with most of the rest of the Atomic Physics…

Super Bowl Athletes Are Scientists At Work

I wrote up another piece about football for the Conversation, this time drawing on material from Eureka, explaining how great football players are using scientific thinking: Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman gets called a lot of things. He calls himself the greatest cornerback in the NFL (and Seattle fans tend to agree). Sportswriters and some other players call him a loudmouth and a showboater. Fans of other teams call him a lot of things that shouldn’t see print (even on the internet). One thing you’re not likely to hear anyone on ESPN call Sherman, though, is “scientist.” And…

The Greatest “Amateur” Astronomer of All-Time (Synopsis)

“What you do is, you have your drawing board and a pencil in hand at the telescope. You look in and you make some markings on the paper and you look in again.” -Clyde Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto We often make a big distinction between professional and amateur today, and very rarely expect to find amateurs whose contributions to a major scientific enterprise will change the field forever. Yet back in the 19th Century, even astronomy and physics -- arguably the most developed of the sciences at the time -- had room for pioneers from all walks of life. Image credit: Copperplate engraving…

The fruits of war (creationist branch)

Duae Quartunciae (will he ever settle on a name?) has an excellent historical summary of the Answers in Genesis civil war. There's loads of fun stuff there, including an account of a prior split that involved accusations of witchcraft and "demonic infiltration", Ken Ham's pitiful claim that he is currently under "spiritual attack", and bizarre sleazy shenanigans, largely driven by the nastily ambitious American group led by Ken Ham. In October of 2005, there was a fateful meeting between AiG-USA and members of the board of the Australian group [now called Creation Ministries Internation, CMI…

State Of Emergency in California

Governor Jerry Brown has declared a state of emergency for the Santa Barbara oil spill. Phyllis Grifman, associate director of the USC Sea Grant Program, is quoted i a a University of Southern California press release as saying, "Nothing worked – they found out about this because people camping nearby or living nearby smelled it. Nothing happened on the part of the infrastructure that could shut it down early." The spill, she notes, sits beteween two areas under protection for endangered marine wildlife. Taj Meshkati, also a USC professor (of engineering) asked, "Why did it take the…

Record Highs Beating Record Lows 2:1 With Global Warming

Record daily high and low temperatures happen now and then at a give weather station. In a normal, stable climate the number of record highs and record lows should be about even. But with human-caused global warming, record highs are expected to be more common than record lows. And they are. Climate Nexus has this handy dandy widget to track record highs and record lows over the previous year. Click to see the 1950s, when global warming was not as severe at it is today. Then look at the 1990s when things were starting to take off. Then look at the last year. Here is NCAR's Gerry Meehl…

Weekend Diversion: Animals Being Dicks

"Some of them act badly because they've had a hard life, or have been mistreated...but, like people, some of them are just jerks. Stop that, Mr. Simpson." -The Simpsons Sometimes, it's good to just take a step back and enjoy something that's easy. There's a lot in this world to think about, worry about, learn about, and fight about. So while you enjoy this weekend's song, Fight Like The Night,by Malcolm Middleton, I present to you the latest in time-wasting, entertaining, funny animal websites: Animals Being Dicks. Short, animated gifs of... well, exactly what you might expect. And, as you…

Weekend Diversion: For a Young Soul

"Ordinary riches can be stolen; real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you." -Oscar Wilde For those of you who don't typically listen to soul singers, you may want to have a listen to this. There's always something about live performances that bring out their best, and so this weekend I present to you, I Heard Love Is Blind.To those of you who don't recognize the voice or the song, I hope you at least recognize the talent and the quality of what you're listening to. Because that's Amy Winehouse. That's live, off of her debut album, Frank,…

SEC goes after Exxon over Climate Change?

For some time now ExxonMobil Corporation has been under scrutiny for having a) known about climate change, yet b) helped cause climate change, while c) investing corporate resources into getting people and the government to not take climate change seriously. Worst case allegation: ExxonMobile has taken material steps, knowingly and intentionally, that will cause the end of civilization as we know it. That, of course, is not illegal. But along the way, perhaps some laws have been broken, and some in the legal biz have been looking into this. Now, suddenly, we hear from the Wall Street Journal…

If Bernie Sanders was Playing Poker He Would Not Fold

Since 1968, about 17 candidates ran in Democratic primary races and earned enough votes (above about 20% all told) to count as having been contenders. Of those, one was murdered, one was shot but lived, one was eliminated from competition by GOP dirty tricks, and one left the race because of insufficient support but would probably have been exposed as having two families (that would have been a scandal) had he stayed in the race. Putting this another way, there is about a 24% chance that a Democrat running in a primary will be taken out of the race for extrinsic reasons. Given the stakes…

Weekend Diversion: Happy Pi Day 2010!

So here we have pi squared, which an engineer would call "10." -Frank King It's Pi Day today in the United States: March 14th, or as we write it, 3/14. (Don't know how you do it in Europe, where there is no 31st of April.) So, let's start things off with a song for the day: Cab Calloway's "Everybody Eats When They Come To My House." Of course, pi is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, and trying to measure it as accurately as possible has been a challenge that humans have taken on for thousands of years. (Even Google gets in on the Pi Day action.) Most people know…

Weekend Diversion: Goodbye to the Swayze

I've got to say, I get some weird things in my head sometimes. I don't know how many of you know who Vashti Bunyan is, but you may have heard a snippet from one of her songs last year in an NFL commercial. The beautiful, haunting song is called Train Song and it was the first song I thought of when I heard that Patrick Swayze died. The song, of course, isn't about death at all. It's about traveling to meet someone you haven't seen in a long time and having your heart in your throat during the whole journey while you do it. You might know Patrick Swayze best for Ghost, Dirty Dancing,…

I had no idea Christopher Hitchens was so very, very short

Minuscule, even. Flea-sized. How else am I to interpret Dinesh D'Souza's challenge that he should pick on someone his own size, meaning D'Souza? I've heard D'Souza. He's a babbling pipsqueak. But now he thinks he is a worthy opponent to confront Hitchens, because all the pastors that Hitchens knocks aside as if wielding the jawbone of an ass are such weak and timid little flowers. Besides, Hitchens is tough and mean. Pastors are inhbited because of their position. They can't respond in kind. So Hitchens can call them names but they can't call him names because they have to show Christian…

Rounding up the best from CoS #116

This week's Carnival of Space introduced me to a new site, Habitation Intention. As always, the collection of space-related stories from around the 'net is worth checking out, and I've got my top three picks for you. 1. Goodbye, Moon and Mars! What, you thought that my opinion was shared by many? That we'd find a way to resume manned spaceflight to other worlds? That's we'd head to Mars after maybe stopping off at the Moon first? It isn't going to happen, says Cumbrian Sky. They've got the heartbreaking tale of death due to lack of funding, with some nice anger to go along with it. 2.…

Inspiration from a Typographer

Most of you know that different fonts and typefaces can give your documents a certain feel, a certain flair, or a certain artistic element that you wouldn't get using the same old font for everything. So, I was reading an article about a relatively famous typographer, Eric Gill, the developer of a number of typefaces. The interview is interesting, the history of typefaces is interesting, and getting a perspective on the world 100 years ago is also interesting. But the very last thing that he said, about artistry, beauty, and making something that's valuable, is really what stuck with me: I…

DAMA is at it Again!

Remember how I told you earlier this week that DAMA was going to announce that they found dark matter, even though the signal that they found is not consistent with other experiments? Looks like my powers of predicting the future are pretty damned good. They have a new plot with more data showing the continued modulation at a certain energy range: and also one showing the fact that they see a bunch of extra events happening in that energy range: So here's the stuff that DAMA has seen: a nuclear recoil that has many events in a certain energy range, and has a 2% annual modulation in that…

Links from Scumbags

So I'm looking at some of my recent referrals (that is, webpages that have links to my page that people have used recently to come here) and I see a referral from godhatesfags.com, the webpage of the vile and repulsive Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church of evil bastards. Specifically, their news page linked to this post about the Muhammed caricatures and flag burning. Why did they link to me? I have no idea. But if you're a follower of Phelps and you clicked over here, let me welcome you and let me express my one sincere wish for you: I hope you die a long, slow, painful death filled…

Dover Settles Legal Fees for $1 Million

The Dover school board voted last night to accept a settlement over legal fees stemming from the Kitzmiller case for $1 million. The total cost was over $2 million, which is much higher than I had heard previously: The Dover Area school board voted Tuesday night to pay $1 million in legal fees to the attorneys that successfully sued the district over its intelligent-design policy. In addition, each of the 11 plaintiffs will also receive $1 in nominal damages. Eight of the nine board members voted in favor while Bryan Rehm, who is also a plaintiff, abstained... The $1 million figure was the…

Anderson on Bush the Theocrat

Jim Anderson has a slightly different take on the State of the Union address than I did. He actually liked some of the rhetoric (since I didn't bother to listen to it, I didn't much care about what a speechwriter wrote for him to say). Along the way, he makes a point that I do agree with: No matter what fears of theocracy lefties may harbor, they're misplaced when directed at Bush. Bush isn't a theocrat any more than tee-ball is baseball or Keanu Reeves is an actor. I think this is correct and I think some of the rhetoric on the left in this regard gets a little hysterical. I certainly fear…

Political Hypocrisy on Display

I love watching C-SPAN on days like today when the hypocrisy of both parties is on full display. The Democrats go on about not having enough time for adequate debate when everyone knows that the attempted filibuster has nothing at all to do with that. The Republicans talk about the undue and thoroughly lamentable influence of "interest groups" trumping the will of "the American people", as though there are no conservative "interest groups" pressuring Republicans. Orrin Hatch, of all people, stands up and delivers a self-righteous screed about the horror of a judicial nominee being denied an…

Bang your own drum, but please do bang it

Richard Dawkins defends the Out Campaign. I really have to stress to everyone who complains that they don't like the design, that it's too bold, that it's too timid, that they don't believe in joining anything, etc., that this is not about conformity — you don't have to wear the big red "A" t-shirt, and no one is going to draft you into the Atheist Army. This is a plea for everyone to get loud and make your beliefs known. Atheists generally are not joiners or conformists or big fans public displays of unity, but we have to start forming some kind of loose interessengemeinschaft — a fellowship…

Tithing for Swords

I've written before about Rod Parsley, a TV preacher I started watching long before he became such a powerful figure in the religious right. I've written about watching his show one night and seeing him say the following mind-numbing statement: How do I know that the Bible is the word of God? Because it's the only book that claims to be the word of God. So I don't need the Koran...I don't need the book of Mormon...." The camera panned over the gathered throng as they shouted "amen, brother" at this stupendously idiotic statement he had just made, all of them apparently blissfully immune to…

So Much for Secondhand Smoking Dangers

I don't smoke. Not only do I not smoke, but my mother died because she smoked and I had to watch her struggle with 22% total lung capacity and later a lung transplant. If anyone should be anti-smoking, it should be me, right? And I am anti-smoking in the sense that I don't smoke and I don't think others should either. I wish every smoker would quit. But I frankly think that we have gone enirely overboard with our anti-smoking hysteria in terms of government intervention, and a large part of that is due to the nonsense we hear constantly about the dangers of second hand smoke. In New York and…

Follow up on Mirecki

Nick Matzke has added an addendum to the bottom of Gary Hurd's post about Mirecki at the Panda's Thumb. I didn't know he was going to do this, but I'm glad he did and it only reinforces the enormous respect I already had for him. While I'm slightly more inclined to be skeptical than Nick is, I don't find anything unreasonable at all in the scenario he draws out for what he thinks happened. It is entirely plausible to me, which doesn't necessarily mean it's true. My argument from the beginning of this has been that reasonable people, regardless of what side of the evolution/ID divide they may…

Humor in Court

The latest transcript is out. It is the day 12 am transcript, which is part 2 of the cross examination of Michael Behe. There's a laugh-out-loud moment near the start. Before they began the cross of Behe, our attorneys wanted to alert the judge that they might be using material from the next draft of the textbook Of Pandas and People, just a couple short passages, during the questioning. That draft is protected by a court order and cannot be released publicly, so they wanted to alert the judge that they were going to use a small bit of it in case he wanted to do that part of the questioning…

New Documentation of Catholic Priest Abuse

New documents released by the Los Angeles Diocese of the Roman Catholic Church as part of a negotiated settlement show a 75 year pattern of priests accused of abuse being transferred from church to church and school to school: The confidential records show that for more than 75 years the nation's largest archdiocese shipped accused priests between therapy and new assignments, often ignoring parishioners' complaints. And, in many cases, there was little mention of child molestation. Instead, euphemisms such as "boundary violations" were used to describe the conduct. The documents were released…

ACLU Defends Deviants

I guess those who wondered just how far the depravity of the ACLU would go have their answer. We should have known that the slippery slope that the ACLU was on due to defending the rights of the KKK and NAMBLA would eventually lead to them defending even the likes of Jerry Falwell. Now remember, this is the same moron who, after the WTC bombings, said: The ACLU's got to take a lot of blame for this. And, I know that I'll hear from them for this. But, throwing God out successfully with the help of the federal court system, throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools. The…

Another Creationist Blames it All on Evolution

Gary Peterson of Country Keepers has joined Jerry Falwell in blaming gay marriage - and every other thing they don't like that's going on - on evolution. Like Falwell, Peterson is quoting Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis, who published a letter on their website with a scare list of allegedly horrible things going on and concluded: Friends, the above are just a few samples of things happening in America and other Western nations. Ive said this before, but I want to say it againperhaps a little more bluntly, for Im so burdened for this nation. The major reason America (and the West) is losing…

First particle successfully quantum teleported into space; are transporters next? (Synopsis)

"There would be no Star Trek unless there were transporter malfunctions." -LeVar Burton Since way before even Star Trek, the idea of teleportation was featured in Shakespeare, The Arabian Nights, and even the Jewish Talmud. To disappear at one location and reappear at another has long been a science-fiction dream of humanity, but science has, thus far, declared it to be impossible. Nevertheless, there are some quantum technologies that are progressing that may, at least, enable the teleportation of the information encoding any system. If two particles are entangled, they have complementary…

Ask Ethan: Could We Save The Earth By Migrating It Away From The Sun? (Synopsis)

"I would argue that in any habitable zone that doesn't boil or freeze, intelligent life is going to emerge because intelligence is convergent." -Simon Conway Morris Someday, in the far distant future, the evolution of the Sun will cause it to heat up and emit so much energy that the Earth’s surface will reach a terrible threshold: 100 degrees Celsius (212 degrees Fahrenheit). When this happens, the oceans will boil away, rendering the surface completely uninhabitable and inhospitable to even the most extreme known forms of life. If we do nothing to prevent it, then at some point over the…

It's Dimming! Astronomers jump at opportunity to solve the mystery of Tabby's Star (Synopsis)

"As far as I can tell, every telescope that can look at it right now is looking at it right now." -Matt Muterspaugh Earlier this decade, the Kepler mission became the most successful planet-finding endeavor of all time, turning up thousands of new worlds by measuring the transit data of some 150,000 stars. When planets passed in front of their parent star, they blocked a tiny fraction of their light, leaving behind an imprint of a periodic dimming signal. But one star dims differently from all the others. Different steps in the Kepler time series data that show the periodic and aperiodic…

NASA's idea for a space station in lunar orbit takes humanity nowhere (Synopsis)

“We had this whole big beautiful place for discovery, and all we could think to do with it was wipe out everything that made it worth discovering.” -Buzz Aldrin It’s been more than 40 years since humans last set foot on the Moon. The final space shuttle flight occurred six years ago already, and the International Space Station is set to reach the end of its life a few years from now. At the 33rd Space Symposium last month, NASA announced their new, bold plan for crewed spaceflight: a crewed space station that orbits the Moon. The Orion capsule would be one of many components on a proposed…

After 50 Years Of Missions, We're Finally Ready To Know: Is There Life On Mars? (Synopsis)

"They say once you grow crops somewhere, you have officially 'colonized' it. So technically, I colonized Mars. In your face, Neil Armstrong!" -Andy Weir In the early 1960s, humanity began launching spacecraft to Mars, hoping to find out what the red planet was truly like. While early images revealed a heavily cratered surface, similar to that of the Moon, that turned out to be reflective of only a portion of the surface. Mars contains dust storms, basins, extinct volcanoes and the largest chasm of any planet in the Solar System. A dust storm on Mars, a common occurrence during the Martian…

The Future Of Energy Isn't Fossil Fuels Or Renewables, It's Nuclear Fusion (Synopsis)

"I would like nuclear fusion to become a practical power source. It would provide an inexhaustible supply of energy, without pollution or global warming." -Stephen Hawking Climate science is a hotly debated area, with many disputing the robustness and ethical motivations of the scientists in the field. But even if you throw everything we know about carbon dioxide, global warming, and climate change away, there’s still an energy crisis coming in the long term. The fact is, fossil fuels will someday, hundreds of years from now, run out if we extract and burn them all. Wind farms, like many…

How much gold is in the James Webb Space Telescope? (Synopsis)

"Hey, if our eyes could access the infrared part of the light spectrum, the sky would be green and trees would be red. Some animals see in completely different ways, so who knows what colors look like to them. Nothing is really how we perceive it." -Wendy Mass If you take a look at the James Webb Space Telescope, the most visually striking feature of all is the gold mirrors. Yet gold would make an absolutely terrible material for constructing these mirrors! For very sound scientific reasons, the vast majority of these mirrors are made out of beryllium, not gold, and gold doesn't even enter…

Why Doesn't Antimatter Anti-Gravitate? (Synopsis)

"If something doesn’t reach you on a personal level, let it go. It’s hard enough dealing with everything that does." -Judi Culbertson There are two types of electric charge: positive and negative. Like charges repel; opposite charges attract. In gravitation, though, there’s only one kind of gravitational charge, more commonly known as mass. And everything we know of has a positive mass. But since there’s a counterpart to matter -- antimatter -- isn’t it possible that antimatter would have negative gravitational charge, and fall “up” in a gravitational field? If there were some type of matter…

The first woman in space turns 80, and you've probably never heard of her (Synopsis)

"A bird cannot fly with one wing only. Human space flight cannot develop any further without the active participation of women." -Valentina Tereshkova Sally Ride was the first American woman in space, launched aboard the space shuttle Challenger in 1983 amidst controversy. At 32, she was the youngest astronaut in history, surrounded by questions such as “will it ruin her reproductive organs,” “what if she’s menstruating” and “will she weep if something goes wrong on the job?” But 20 years prior, cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova proved that women had every bit as much mettle and ability as the…

Firing a gun into the air can kill someone (Synopsis)

"I've heard it said that God made all men, but Samuel Colt made all men equal. We'd see what Mr. Colt could do for a woman." ― Cherie Priest Bullets are incredibly dangerous when fired from a gun, but that's true even when they're fired up in the air, not at a target directly. Falling, stray bullets can still reach very large speeds, large enough to break the skin and cause internal damage, potentially even killing someone. A 0.50 caliber bullet wound of the face. The patient was injured while heating a 0.50 caliber incendiary machine gun bullet with a blowtorch in a World War II-era…