In the News
drorzel | September 27, 2006The AIP news feed features a story about a paper suggesting that the universe is ellipsoidal. Or at least, that it was, back in the early days.
The work is based on the famous WMAP picture of the microwave background (and no, it's not because the picture is oblong):
As you know, Bob, the picture shows the distribution of temperature fluctuations in the early universe. These temperature correlations correspond to slight variations in the density of matter at that time, density fluctuations that eventually evolved into galaxies and galaxy clusters.
(Explanation after the cut.)
We can't…
drorzel | September 21, 2006Five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor are currently facing execution in Libya, charged with deliberately infrecting some 400 children with AIDS. An independent scientific study of the matter found that most of the children were infected well before the "Tripoli Six" even entered the country, but the study was dismissed by the court.
The case has largely been ignored by the media (I only learned of it last night), but the consesnsus is that international pressure is the only way to clear the six. In particular, Declan Butler is calling for scientists and bloggers to spread word of…
drorzel | September 17, 2006So, the good news is, Gregg Easterbrook is writing about football for ESPN again. His "Tuesday Morning Quarterback" columns are some of the most entertaining football writing around. Here's hoping he can make it through the whole season without saying something stupid to get himself fired.
The bad news is, Gregg Easterbrook is writing about science for Slate. Actually, Gregg Easterbrook writing about anything other than football is bad news, but science is particularly bad. His knowledge of the subject always seems to operate at the Star Trek sort of level-- like he's read the glossary of a…
drorzel | September 15, 2006The New York Times has a story about yet another weird extrasolar planet, this one a gigantic fluffy ball of gas bigger than Jupiter, but less dense than water:
While gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn are made primarily of hydrogen and helium, they also possess rocky cores and crushing pressures within that squeeze the hydrogen and helium to higher densities. Jupiter's average density is 133 percent greater that of water, while Saturn's is 70 percent that of water. The density of HAT-1-P is one-quarter that of water.
Astrophysicists now have two problems to solve: how a planet that has…
drorzel | September 7, 2006This is nearly a month old, now, because I keep saying "Oh, Idon't have time to do this justice-- I'll write about it tomorrow." I really need to stop doing that.
Anyway, Physics News Update has a story about a scheme to measure gravity using Bloch oscillations, based on a paper in Physical Review Letters. This is especially interesting to me, because the most important paper of my career made use of Bloch oscillations to get our experimental signal.
A quick explanation below the fold:
Bloch oscillations are a weird phenomenon you encounter in condensed matter physics. The easiest way to…
drorzel | August 31, 2006The American Institutes of Physics run an occasionally updated news feed, Physics News Updates, that I have in my RSS subscriptions. Yesterday, for some reason, it coughed up a squib about last week's Pluto news, which starts:
Just as in the Bible Adam achieved dominion over the objects of the earth by naming them, so scientists partly establish human dominion over the cosmos by naming or classifying all things animal, vegetable, or mineral.
While I find myself in the odd position of being the token Defender of Religion on ScienceBlogs, or at least the local Tolerator of Religious Language…
drorzel | August 24, 2006In the comments to the recent post on BMI, commenter Colst pointed to another study of mortality and BMI that found significantly higher risks for overweight people. Today, I see that Kevin Beck at Dr. Bushwell's Chimpanzee refuge has a post describing what I think is the same study, with the title Risk of death much higher in overweight and obese. Which is true, if you look at the data in the right way.
Kevin posted a bunch of graphs from the study, and I'll excerpt two of them to keep things readable. The first is the relative risk of death for all the men in the study, as a function of BMI…
drorzel | August 23, 2006This morning's Times bring a story saying that astronomers are still dithering about Pluto. The latest plan would create a new category of "dwarf planets," and presumably get the International Astronomical Union eaten by Cthullu.
My immediate response is: "Jesus, people, make up your frickin' minds!"
Look, the joke is over, ok? The Pluto story has officially worn out its welcome. Pick a definition, any definition, and go home. Make room for some real science news.
Honestly, this is why physicists sneer at astronomers. Not only do they use dumb units, and have the axes backwards on most of…
drorzel | August 22, 2006Over at Pure Pedantry, Jake has a nice post about a study showing that the ever-popular Body Mass Index measure is not a good predictor of the risk of heart disease. He's got a lot of details about the study, including this graph of risk vs. BMI:
Now, here's the thing. This is the second study I recall hearing about that has a similar result-- there was a flurry of articles a while back about a large study (or maybe one of those meta-studies) showing that people who were slightly overweight according to BMI had lower mortality than those of "normal" weight. And now, this study shows that…
drorzel | August 22, 2006there's a fascinating article in the TimeS this morning about Chinese physicist Xu Liangying, a man who has led an interesting life, to say the least:
The first time he was purged, Xu Liangying was 27, an up-and-coming physicist, philosopher and historian and a veteran of the Communist underground. He had to divorce his wife, leave his sons and go live on his mother's farm in the country.
Three decades later, only a heart attack saved him from imprisonment or worse during the massacre that ended the democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989.
During the Cultural…
drorzel | August 21, 2006As hinted last week, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory has some new results conclusively showing that dark matter is a real, physical thing. This is big news, because the previous evidence for dark matter was all indirect, and based on inferring the mass distribution of galaxies and clusters of galaxies from looking at their motion. These results could indicate the presence of dark matter, or they could point to a flaw in our understanding of gravity at extremely long ranges.
The new observation shows fairly conclusively that dark matter and ordinary matter are different things, by combining two…
drorzel | August 18, 2006As the "binary liquid explosive" plot sounds a little implausible, and the usual lack of, you know, hard evidence regarding the plot begins to become clear, the question has to be asked: what was really up with the terror plot that has banned an entire phase of matter?
Wondermark has the answer.
(Register link via Calpundit Monthly, Wondermark link via a mailing list.)
drorzel | August 15, 2006There's an interesting article in the Times today about Grisha Perelman and the Poincare conjecture:
Three years ago, a Russian mathematician by the name of Grigory Perelman, a k a Grisha, in St. Petersburg, announced that he had solved a famous and intractable mathematical problem, known as the Poincaré conjecture, about the nature of space.
After posting a few short papers on the Internet and making a whirlwind lecture tour of the United States, Dr. Perelman disappeared back into the Russian woods in the spring of 2003, leaving the world's mathematicians to pick up the pieces and decide…
drorzel | August 9, 2006I had a bunch of students over for dinner last night, and while I was busy with that, stuff happened in the world. I hate that.
Of course, there's been a lot of energy expended on trivia like primary elections, but that's not what I'm talking about. The important news all has to do with physics.
First, via His Holiness, Peter Zoller has been awarded the Dirac Medal from the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics. It's not as big a deal as the Nobel Prize, or anything, but it's well-deserved recognition, both for Zoller and for the quantum computing sorts of topics he works…
drorzel | July 30, 2006Miscellaneous stories that caught my eye in today's New York Times:
First, on the science sdie of things, a long article about how people are living longer, not to mention bigger and healthier, than their ancestors. It compares medical records for Civil War veterans with people of similar age today, and finds amazing reductions in all manner of health problems. This is attributed to better pre-natal and early-childhood nutrition and medical care.
I hope this is on the radar for the various medical types here at ScienceBlogs, as I'd love to hear the opinions of real live doctors on this. It…
drorzel | July 21, 2006So, you've finally achieved (through a combination of hard work and inheritance) a livable monthly income, and are looking for a way to cut loose and splurge a little?
Well, for just $35 million, you can both visit the Space Station and walk in space ($20 million to get there, $15 million for the spacewalk). Start saving now!
drorzel | July 20, 2006Via James Nicoll, there's a new press release from the Cassini mission talking about new radar maps of a region on the surface of Titan that's been dubbed "Xanadu." The topography looks very Earth-like, with rivers and lakes and oceans of methane, providing Dr. Jonathan Lunine an opportunity to show off the benefits of a classical education:
"Although Titan gets far less sunlight and is much smaller and colder than Earth, Xanadu is no longer just a mere bright spot, but a land where rivers flow down to a sunless sea," Lunine said.
(Based on the other comments quoted, this is another case…
drorzel | July 19, 2006Scientific Curmudgeon John Horgan reads calls for more nuclear power and offers a slightly different objection to nuclear power than most people:
Five years ago, I might have considered climbing aboard this bandwagon, even though Indian Point has an imperfect safety record, but not any more. In fact, I want to whack the neo-nukers and the Times Magazine for irresponsibly downplaying the immense security risks posed by nuclear power.
On September 11, 2001, one of the hijacked jets flew down the Hudson River right past Garrison. A woman I know was gardening that morning outside her house on…
drorzel | July 10, 2006Via See You at Enceladus, a Canadian team has succeeded in making a flapping-wing airplane:
Yesterday Dr. James DeLaurier, an aeronautical engineer and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto's Institute for Aerospace Studies, fulfilled a lifelong dream, seeing his manned mechanical flapping-wing airplane, or ornithopter, fly ? a dream first imagined by Leonardo da Vinci.
And with the successful flight DeLaurier has been lucky enough to touch what many describe as the Holy Grail of aeronautical design, achieving a place for himself, his team of volunteers and students in aviation…
drorzel | June 27, 2006There was an interesting article in the Times today about the possibility of "geoengineering":
In the past few decades, a handful of scientists have come up with big, futuristic ways to fight global warming: Build sunshades in orbit to cool the planet. Tinker with clouds to make them reflect more sunlight back into space. Trick oceans into soaking up more heat-trapping greenhouse gases.
Their proposals were relegated to the fringes of climate science. Few journals would publish them. Few government agencies would pay for feasibility studies. Environmentalists and mainstream scientists said…