In the News
drorzel | June 27, 2006Via Cosmic Variance, news of the Shaw Prize in Astronomy for 2006:
Saul Perlmutter, Adam Riess, and Brian Schmidt are awarded the Shaw Prize in Astronomy 2006 in recognition of their leadership roles on the two teams that made the remarkable discovery of an acceleration in the rate of the expansion of the universe. Such an effect had been known theoretically since shortly after Einstein applied his theory of general relativity to cosmology, but the general belief, including Einstein¡¦s own assessment, was that the cosmological constant had no basis in reality. Thus, the 1998 announcement of…
drorzel | June 26, 2006I've got a grant proposal to review, and a progress report to write for one of my own grants, so you're getting short, link-y physics blogging:
- The Strings 2006 conference has ended, with the participants apparently deciding to keep up with this "string theory" thing (maybe you've heard of it?) for a little while longer. Talk slides from many of the speakers are available here. Of course, if you can understand them, you probably already knew that, and if you didn't know that, you probably won't get much from the slides, but there you go.
- The Wall Street Journal piece talking about Peter…
drorzel | June 23, 2006It's almost finished now, so this is a little late in being posted, but the Washington Post has been running a week-long series of on-line chats with noted "futurists," under the title Beyond the Future. I'm a little dubious about most "futurism," but reading about people's predictions for future trends and gadgets can be a good way to waste a little time on a Friday afternoon, if you're so inclined...
(Sadly, I can't really afford the time-- I've got to get back to my windowless basement lab, and align some optics...)
drorzel | June 20, 2006For those interested in keeping abreast of the latest stuff on string theory and its discontents, some links:
Jonathan Shock is based in Beijing, and blogging about the Strings 2006 meeting. He's got a first-day recap including descriptions of several of the talks, and incident events.
Victor Rivelles is also blogging from Beijing, and has recaps of day one and day two.
The Paper of Record loves Stephen Hawking, and writes about his visit to China for the conference.
Christine Dantas has re-posted her top ten lists (which were taken down in part due to some unpleasant comment behavior). The…
drorzel | June 13, 2006There's a piece in the New York Times this morning about a German project to send a balloon-borne rover to Mars that's got a little something for everyone. It's a Mars mission, which never gets old, but it's also a privately financed project, and thus a nice demonstration of the power of private enterprise, for those who favor private space exploration. It's not quite clear to me that what they're proposing will work (one or two of the elements sound a little goofy), but they're certainly fired up about it.
And really, why shouldn't they be? Balloons on Mars are just cool.
drorzel | June 10, 2006Large meteorite hits northern Norway:
A large meteorite struck in northern Norway this week, landing with an impact an astronomer compared to the atomic bomb used at Hiroshima.
The meteorite appeared as a ball of fire just after 2 a.m. Wednesday, visible across several hundred miles in the sunlit summer sky above the Arctic Circle, Aftenposten reported.
My favorite bit of the (very short) story is this living-in-the-future moment, though:
Peter Bruvold, a farmer, said he happened to be out in the fields with a camera because he was tending a foaling mare and he photographed the fireball.…
drorzel | June 8, 2006Look-- miniature dinosaurs! OK, fine, they're not that small:
These "dwarf" dinosaurs were slightly longer and heavier than a car, Sander said. "They stopped growing when they reached 6 metres [20 feet] in length and a ton in body mass," he estimated. Their brachiosaur cousins, by contrast, were up to 45 metres (148 feet) long and weighed 80 tons, as much as a small town of over 1,000 inhabitants.
Still, miniature dinosaurs are cool...
drorzel | June 3, 2006PZ notes and article about a controversial physics demonstration:
Every year, physics teacher David Lapp brings his Korean War era M-1 carbine to school, fires a shot into a block of wood and instructs his students to calculate the velocity of the bullet.
It is a popular experiment at Mill Valley's Tamalpais High School, where students are exposed to several unique stunts that Lapp performs in his five classes every year to illustrate inertia, velocity and other complex formulae.
Turns out, it also may be illegal.
The legal problem is due to laws that were passed as an over-reaction to the…
drorzel | June 2, 2006The post title pretty much says it. Raymond Davis Jr., who shared the Nobel Prize in 2002 for his work on detecting neutrinos, died Wednesday. The Times obituatary showed up in my RSS feeds today.
Davis got his dynamite money for the neutrino detection experiment that he ran for years in the Homestake mine, where a giant tank of industrial cleaning fluid was placed so that an occasional neutrino would react with a chlorine atom and change it into an argon atom. Every few months, Davis would sift through the thousands of gallons of liquid to pull out tens or hundreds of argon atoms, and detect…
drorzel | May 30, 2006There's an interesting story in the Times this morning about efforts to make robotic space probes more autonomous. The idea is that it would be nice to be able to explore the Solar System without the big delays introduced by light-speed communications lags. In the absence of an ansible, autonomous robots are the best way to accomplish this.
I don't really have anything to add, I just wanted to note the article. I'm going to start posting more short link-y things, for a variety of reasons, and this is one such post.
drorzel | May 26, 2006Over in the right-hand sidebar, Seed is pushing a short piece on Laurie Pycroft, a 16-year-old Briton who founded Pro-Test, an organization supporting animal testing. This was all over the UK papers a couple of months ago, and a little Googling turns up a piece by Pycroft himself telling the story of the group's origins.
(Note to Seed overlords: I shouldn't need to Google this stuff. Why not put a link to Pycroft's web site in the web version of the article?)
I have to say, I'm terribly disappointed with what this says about the state of modern youth, particularly in Europe. Doesn't he know…
drorzel | May 25, 2006The science story of the day is probably the Department of Education Report on science test scores, cited in this morning's New York Times. They administered a test to fourth, eight, and twelfth-graders nationwide, aking basic science questions, and compared the scores to similar tests given in 1996 and 2000. (Update: John Lynch has some thoughts, and includes a couple of the questions.)
The headline-grabbing result is that the twelfth-grade scroes are down over the last ten years, while the fourth-grade scores rose. The educational system of the nation is clearly in free-fall, and we'll all…
drorzel | May 2, 2006A couple of good science stories in today's New York Times:
First, an article on the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). The current news hook, weirdly, appears to be a recent calculation of the expected magnitude of the signal resulting from the collision and merger of two black holes. Why this merits a long article, I'm not sure-- I was under the impression that they already had a decent idea of the expected signal sizes-- but it's a decent article.
The other story will probably get more play, as it's about the deathless topic of problems with peer review. As others…
drorzel | April 19, 2006I retain just enough of my childhood fascination with dinosaurs to be interested in a headline like "A Meat Eater Bigger Than T. Rex Is Unearthed". Of course, most of the information you would really want is right there in the headline: New dinosaur species, really big, carnivorous, next story please.
Subsequent years of scientific training have given me a second reaction to this sort of story, after "Whoa, cool." Namely, "Boy, the graphics with this story are useless." I mean, the little shadow-dinosaur jpeg at left is a standard thing, but the almost completely featureless map of Argentina…
drorzel | April 12, 2006The Kuiper Belt Controversy continues, with the lastest round showing up in the Times today: Planet Discovered Last Year, Thought to Be Larger Than Pluto, Proves Roughly the Same Size:
The object -- still unnamed more than a year after its discovery but tagged with the temporary designation 2003 UB313 and nicknamed Xena by the discoverer -- covered an area only 1.5 pixels wide in the digital image, taken by the space telescope in December. But that was enough to extract the diameter: 1,490 miles, give or take 60 miles.
A previous estimate by a team of German researchers, based on measurements…
drorzel | April 11, 2006On a note related to the previous entry, Inside Higher Ed had a longer story about Carl Wieman leaving Colorado for Canada (following in the footsteps of his post-docs?), another guy putting his money where his mouth is:
First, he contributed $250,000 of his Nobel Prize award to the Physics Education Technology Fund supporting classroom initiatives at CU-Boulder. He hoped it would prompt other donations, but the momentum never materialized.
Last year, during his sabbatical, Wieman wrote 35 proposals for funding for teaching projects. All he got was one small grant from the National Science…
drorzel | April 11, 2006There's a nice profile of Randy Olson, the biologist-turned filmmaker behind A Flock of Dodos, which takes a hard look at both sides of the creationism wars:
The biologist, Randy Olson, accepts that there is no credible scientific challenge to the theory of evolution as an explanation for the diversity and complexity of life on earth. He agrees that intelligent design's embrace of a supernatural "agent" puts it outside the realm of science.
But when he watches the advocates of intelligent design at work, he sees pleasant people who speak plainly, convincingly and with humor. When scientists…
drorzel | April 2, 2006There's a little squib in the New York Times today about the return of the Dawn mission to visit a couple of asteroids, one of their little not-quite-a-full-story things in the "Week in Review" section of the print edition (we get the Sunday Times delivered, because I find it much more civilized to spend a lazy Sunday morning reading a physical newspaper than staring at a computer monitor). The mission was suspended several months ago due to cost overruns, and general budget tightness at NASA these days.
Following an appeal, it's been reinstated, with the launch date pushed back a year (…
drorzel | March 25, 2006In the New York Times newsfeed this morning, we have:
First Rocket Is Lost by Space Company
A private venture hailed as the beginning of a new age of cheap and reliable access to space suffered a setback yesterday when its first rocket was lost over the Pacific Ocean about a minute after liftoff.
The rocket, called Falcon, was being launched from Omelek Island in the Marshall Islands by SpaceX, a company that has $200 million in contracts from the Pentagon, foreign governments and private companies to put small payloads in orbit. The company said Falcon was carrying an Air Force satellite.…
drorzel | March 24, 2006A reader emails to ask if I can make sense of this announcement from the European Space Agency:
Scientists funded by the European Space Agency have measured the gravitational equivalent of a magnetic field for the first time in a laboratory. Under certain special conditions the effect is much larger than expected from general relativity and could help physicists to make a significant step towards the long-sought-after quantum theory of gravity.
Just as a moving electrical charge creates a magnetic field, so a moving mass generates a gravitomagnetic field. According to Einstein's Theory of…