In the News
drorzel | June 10, 2009Over at Cosmic Variance, Julianne is annoyed at Nature's embargo policy. It seems that somebody or another posted a paper to the arxiv while submitting it to Nature, and included a note on the arxiv submission asking people to abide by Nature's embargo.
So, instead of blogging about the Incredibly Exciting Discovery (which I'd loooove to talk about), I'm writing about what a ridiculous fiction the authors are asking us all to participate in, for the sake of the authors' potentially getting a publication accepted to Nature. The authors advertised a paper to thousands of interesting, engaged…
drorzel | May 6, 2009I'm waiting for the toaster when the dog trots into the kitchen. "You should give me some bacon!" she says.
"Why is that?" I ask.
"To prevent swine flu!"
"Look, there's no chance that I'm going to get swine flu from eating pork products. I know you saw some people on the Internet saying that they're not eating pork because of the flu, but those people are idiots."
"Not you, silly," she says. "You should give me bacon so that I don't get swine flu."
"What are you talking about?" It's much too early in the morning for this sort of thing.
"It's like with the shots, at the Bad Place." She really…
drorzel | April 29, 2009I got email this afternoon from Andrei Derevianko, the leader of the research project badly described by the press release mentioned in the previous post. He sounds a little surprised by the whole thing (though not much more surprised than I am that my griping on the Internet got brought to anybody's attention), and explains what happened:
The original story (that I have went through with a writer) is posted here: www.unr.edu.
Unfortunately, the release writers have added introductory paragraph and the title without consulting with me (I was travelling giving talk about our result).
Now…
drorzel | April 28, 2009Yesterday, EurekAlert served up a press release titled New blow for dinosaur-killing asteroid theory, reporting on Gerta Keller of Princeton, who says that the Chicxulub crater isn't really from the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs. Keller thinks the crater had nothing to do with the extinction event, and claims to have found evidence that the impact was as much as 300,000 years before the dinosaurs died out.
One or two of the quotes in the piece sounded kind of snotty for a scientific report, but I marked this down as something to look at later. Later in the day, Ethan "Nitro"…
drorzel | April 16, 2009Physics World has a nice news article about a new experimental development in quantum computing, based on a forthcoming paper from the Wineland group at NIST in Boulder. I'd write this up for ResearchBlogging, but it's still just on the arxiv, and I don't think they've started accepting arxiv papers yet.
The Physics World piece summarizes the key results nicely:
Now, Brad Blakestad and colleagues at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colorado have created a junction in an ion trap in which there is practically no heating. Constructed from laser-machined…
drorzel | April 4, 2009Over at his new digs, Chris Mooney talks about efforts to re-launch the OTA:
I’m starting to detect some buzz on this very important front, which I wrote about in detail in 2005’s The Republican War on Science and elsewhere. Basically, the story is this: In 1995 the Gingrich Republicans, looking to slash budgets–and looking askance at science in general in many areas–got rid of their scientific advisory office, which had been in existence since 1972 and had become world renowned not only for accurate studies, but for far-ranging analyses that forecast future science and technology problems…
drorzel | March 24, 2009Steve calls me out for not commenting on new stories about "cold fusion":
Becky and I have been having much more regular access to the internet since the power was fixed. We check e-mail just about everyday and can even skim yahoo news. Or Professor Orzel's blog. I heard on BBC radio yesterday that there are people who have claimed to have evidence of cold fusion - which made me immediately think of a physics graduate who worked on sonoluminescence (bubble fusion) and of a talk given at Union last year about bubble fusion. Which made me immediately think of Professor Orzel and his skepticism…
drorzel | March 19, 2009I'm giving an exam this morning, then taking the afternoon off for my annual hoops overdose, so there won't be much physics commentary here for the next few days. If you want hot physics news, though, there are a bunch of bloggers at the March Meeting, providing summaries on the Internet:
Doug Natelson has two reports, plus scattered other commentary.
His Holiness is putting everything in one post
Ian Durham has a summary of the first couple of days
Andre at BioCurious has highlights of the biophysics talks
If I'm missing anything, leave a link in the comments.
drorzel | March 3, 2009Having complained about the lack of recognition for good physical science writing recently, it would be bad form for me not to note Dennis Overbye's story about the Kepler spacecraft in today's New York Times:
Presently perched on a Delta 2 rocket at Cape Canaveral is a one-ton spacecraft called Kepler. If all goes well, the rocket will lift off about 10:50 Friday evening on a journey that will eventually propel Kepler into orbit around the Sun. There the spacecraft's mission will be to discover Earth-like planets in Earth-like places -- that is to say, in the not-too-cold, not-too-hot,…
drorzel | February 17, 2009I no longer remember the context, but the Gravity Probe B experiment came up in discussion around the department last week, and nobody could really remember what the status of it was. It came up again during the "Physics: What We Don't Understand" panel Saturday morning, where Geoff Landis was able to supply a few details from inside NASA. It came up again during a later panel on the year in physics and astronomy, and again, Geoff was able to supply some details.
I'm not sure what the deal is, but there's evidently something in the air at the moment making people think about Gravity Probe B,…
drorzel | February 6, 2009There's a new paper from the PAMELA dark matter search out that's written up in Physics, including a link to a free version of the PDF. This paper is considerably less dramatic than one that appeared last year, leading Physics World to suggest that they're backing off the earlier claim.
What's the deal? Sean Carroll has you covered, with a detailed explanation of what's in both papers, and why the findings have been published and reported the way they have:
What happened is that the PAMELA collaboration submitted their second paper (anomalous positrons) to Nature, and their first paper (well-…
drorzel | January 30, 2009I'm not sure what the BBVA Foundation is, but they've awarded a Basic Science prize to Ignacio Cirac and Peter Zoller:
The Basic Sciences award in this inaugural edition of the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards has been shared by physicists Peter Zoller (Austria, 1952) and Ignacio Cirac (Manresa, 1965), "for their fundamental work on quantum information science", in the words of the jury chaired by Theodor W. Hänsch, Nobel Prize in Physics. Zoller and Cirac's research is opening up vital new avenues for the development of quantum computers, immensely more powerful than those we…
drorzel | January 29, 2009As noted in the previous post, I'm supposed to be moderating a panel at Boskone the weekend after next, with the title:
Global Warming: Facts and Myths, (and all that jazz)
This is not my usual line, but then, I don't have to provide expert commentary, I just need to steer the discussion. Still, it would be good to have some idea where to steer it, so I will throw this out to the larger ScienceBlogs community:
What should I make sure to talk about in a panel on global warming facts and myths?
Of course, there are some additional constraints:
1) I'm looking for general discussion topics, not…
drorzel | January 28, 2009Physics World's news aggregator had a story yesterday with the headline Chilly solution to neutrino mass problem, and the one-sentence teaser
Ultracold atoms could be used to measure the mass of the neutrino.
This creates a wonderful image of somehow turning a magneto-optical trap or a Bose-Einstein Condensate into a neutrino detector, which is a nice thought, but highly improbable. Even a BEC has a density a million times less than the density of air, and a volume that's way too small to catch any neutrinos.
So what's going on? The answer is cool in its own right, and the path from the…
drorzel | January 18, 2009Looking for a way to kill some time on a Sunday morning? You could do worse than yesterday's bloggingheads.tv Science Saturday conversation between Chris Mooney and Carl Zimmer:
It's a wide-ranging conversation, covering what to expect from the Obama administration, artifical life, the possibility of life on Mars, Sanjay Gupta, and the future of science in the media. It's like a Sunday-morning talk show, only with smart people.
drorzel | November 14, 2008I got a great "Living in the future" kick out of the headline on the New York Times story about Thursday's big astronomical announcement: First Pictures Taken of Extrasolar Planets. The phrasing of the headline conjures images of pictures of clouds swirling on distant gas giants; alas, the reality is a little more mundane:
In scratchy telescope pictures released to the world Thursday in Science Express, the online version of the journal Science, the new planets appear as fuzzy dots that move slightly around their star from exposure to exposure. Astronomers who have seen the new images agreed…
drorzel | October 29, 2008Steinn asks a provocative question:
has science blogging done any good?
I can think of science policy issues where blogging has made a contribution, and the general spread of information and communication done by blogs has probably had some impact, but has any actual science been directly impacted by blogs, or discussion on blogs? I am hard pressed to think of concrete examples.
I think this is a badly framed question. That is, I think it's a mistake to define "good" for science to exclude science policy questions and the general spread of information. It's a very common mistake, mind, and…
drorzel | October 24, 2008Claims of the non-existence of dark matter are a staple of astro-kookery, but Physics World today has a news story with the provocative title "Galaxy survey casts doubts on cold dark matter," which makes it sound like people from reputable collaborations are questioning the existence of dark matter.
So what's the deal? Well, here's the explanation of the results, which come from a survey of 200-odd galaxies identified by both radio and visible telescopes:
Using data from both telescopes, the team classified the galaxies in terms of six independent properties. These were two optical radii (…
drorzel | October 13, 2008The 2008 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Honor of Alfred Nobel has been awarded to Paul Krugman.
Usually it's the Peace prize that's awarded on the basis of what will make right-wingers' heads explode in the US. They went for a Scandawegian for that one, though, so the economics peusdo-Nobel was the next obvious choice.
Seriously, from what little I understand of economics, Krugman's a good choice, and congratulations to him.
drorzel | October 8, 2008The 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded for the discovery of green fluorescent protein. It's split equally among three scientists, Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie, and Roger Y. Tsien (and just out of curiousity, how do they choose the order in which they list those names?).
The citation just says "for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP," which is bound to produce some snickering. Perhaps it was used in an earmark-funded study of bear DNA, or some such...
My impression, though, based on several years worth of sitting through student talks about…