In the News
drorzel | April 18, 2007I've got another long lab this afternoon, so I'm stealing an idea for an audience-participation thread from James Nicoll:
Name five things we didn't know in the year that you were born that make the universe a richer place to think about.
This is actually a really interesting exercise for showing how rapidly the world has changed in the last N years. I'm not all that old-- to put it in pop-culture terms, the Beatles broke up before I was born-- but when I try to think about the landscape of science since then, it's astonishing how much the world has changed:
My own field of laser cooling,…
drorzel | March 30, 2007Weird ideas never die, they just go underground, and return with new names. "Cold Fusion" is now "Low Energy Nuclear Reactions," and was the subject of a day-long symposium at the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society.
It's not clear how much credence to give this. It can't be entirely kookery, because this was a press release issued by the ACS, and national societies tend not to be completely wacky. Then again, though, I look at things like this:
The original cold fusion experiment in 1989 by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons was dismissed by some scientists as 'bad' science due…
drorzel | March 23, 2007The case of Purdue's Rusi Taleyarkhan, cleared by the university of charges of misconduct in a murky process, has taken another turn. Congress is getting involved, with the Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee of the House Science and Technology Committee requesting more details from the university.
On the one hand, I'm not enthusiastic about Congress getting into this (aren't there some drug-using professional athletes that they could investigate?), but then again, Purdue brought it on themselves with their ridiculously cryptic statements about the case. If they hadn't acted like they…
drorzel | March 21, 2007The latest news in the private space flight game is, well, let's call it mixed:
The second test flight of the privately-built Falcon 1 rocket failed to reach its intended orbit late Tuesday, nearly one year to the day of the booster's ill-fated spaceflight debut.
The two-stage Falcon 1 rocket shot spaceward [image] from its Pacific island launch site at 9:10 p.m. EDT (0110 March 21 GMT), but suffered a roll control malfunction 186 miles (300 kilometers) above Earth before completing its flight plan, its Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) builders said. The rocket was intended to end its…
drorzel | March 15, 2007After a short post-March Meeting lag, Physics World is back to announcing really cool physics results, this time highlighting a paper in Nature (subscription required) by a French group who have observed the birth and death of photons in a cavity. I'm not sure how it is that the French came to dominate quantum optics, but between Serge Haroche and Alain Aspect, most of the coolest experiments in the field seem to have been done in France.
In this particular case, they set up a superconducting resonant cavity for microwaves. Basically, this is like two mirrors facing one another, and a photon…
drorzel | March 11, 2007A good weekend for science in the Sunday New York Times, with a nice magazine article about dark matter and dark energy, and also a piece about the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), inexplicably located in the Book Review section (the article, that is, not the aliens).
It's probably possible to draw some sort of parallel between the two-- after all, the notion of dark matter was viewed as bordeline kookery for decades before gaining wide acceptance, and SETI is still widely viewed as a little bit off. I'm a little discombobulated from yesterday's long trip, though, so I'll…
drorzel | February 22, 2007The only reason I'm not going to hunt and kill James Nicoll for pointing me at the Conservapedia thing is that he also provides a link to the latest results from the Spitzer telescope. Not the one that Kate's former boss uses to keep an eye on the New York State Legislature, but the one that scientists are using to look at the atmospheres of planets around other stars:
The data indicate the two planets are drier and cloudier than predicted. Theorists thought hot Jupiters would have lots of water in their atmospheres, but surprisingly none was found around HD 209458b and HD 189733b. According…
drorzel | February 20, 2007This one came across the RSS feeds last week, when I was getting ready to leave town and didn't have time to post, but I really can't let this slide by without comment. The EurekAlert headling really says it all: Sleep disturbances affect classroom performance:
As a night of bad sleep can have an adverse effect on an adult's performance at work the next day, an insufficient amount of rest can also have a negative impact on how well middle or high school students perform in the classroom. A study published in the February 15th issue of the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine (JCSM) finds that…
drorzel | February 15, 2007As usual, Scott Aaronson says it better than I did:
[M]ost of the commentary strikes me as missing a key point: that to give a degree to a bozo like this, provided he indeed did the work, can only reflect credit on the scientific enterprise. Will Ross now hit the creationist lecture circuit, trumpeting his infidel credentials to the skies? You better believe it. Will he use the legitimacy conferred by his degree to fight against everything the degree stands for? It can't be doubted.
But here's the wonderful thing about science: unlike the other side, we don't need loyalty oaths in order to…
drorzel | February 13, 2007PhysicsWeb has astory about a new theory of axions that claims to resolve some discrepancies between past experiments. Two previous experiments looking for axions-- hypothetical weakly interacting particles that might be an explanation for dark matter-- have found conflicting results: the CAST experiment looking for axions produced in the Sun found nothing, while the PVLAS experiment looking for axions by studying the rotation of polarized light in a magnetic field may have seen something. (I talked a bit about the latter here.)
Of course, the new theory is not without its complications:
Now…
drorzel | February 13, 2007I'm having the sort of morning where I feel like lobbing a grenade at somebody, and the predictable outrage over yesterday's story about a creationist paleontologist is as good a target as any.
The issue here is whether it's appropriate for Marcus Ross to receive a Ph.D. for work in paleontology, given that he's a young-earth creationist. His scientific papers are all perfectly consistent with modern understanding, speaking of events taking place millions of years in the past, but he himself believes the earth is less than 10,000 years old, and was created as described in the Bible.
The usual…
drorzel | February 13, 2007The New York Times reports that Purdue has officially cleared Rusi Taleyarkhan of charges of scientific wrongdoing over his claim to have produced nuclear fusion on a tabletop through the magic of sonoluminescence. You might recall that these claims were made a couple of years ago, but nobody else has been able to replicate them.
Purdue has conducted some sort of inquiry into the matter, and declared that there was nothing dishonest about the results. The inquiry was not what you'd call a model of transparancey, though:
Purdue did not reveal what allegations the committee had considered. It…
drorzel | February 12, 2007Via EurekAlert, the American Association for the Advnacement of Science has announced the 2006 winners of their science journalism awards. Most of the written pieces are available online, so if you're looking for science-y things to read, this could be a good source of material.
None of the winners are bloggers, and there's no blogging category. I guess it's Advantage: MSM! For the moment, at least...
drorzel | February 12, 2007There's an interesting story in the New York Times this morning about a young earth creationist studying paleontology
[Marcus Ross's] subject was the abundance and spread of mosasaurs, marine reptiles that, as he wrote, vanished at the end of the Cretaceous era about 65 million years ago. The work is "impeccable," said David E. Fastovsky, a paleontologist and professor of geosciences at the university who was Dr. Ross's dissertation adviser. "He was working within a strictly scientific framework, a conventional scientific framework."
But Dr. Ross is hardly a conventional paleontologist. He is…
drorzel | February 7, 2007Eurekalert has a press release from Yale proclaiming that:
Chemists at Yale have done what Mother Nature chose not to -- make a protein-like molecule out of non-natural building blocks, according to a report featured early online in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
Nature uses alpha-amino acid building blocks to assemble the proteins that make life as we know it possible. Chemists at Yale now report evidence that nature could have used a different building block - beta-amino acids -- and show that peptides assembled from beta-amino acids can fold into structures much like…
drorzel | February 6, 2007President Bush's budget request for next year has been released. Surprising approximately no-one who has followed current events over the last seven years, it's a mixed bag for science:
President Bush rolled out a 2008 spending plan Monday that disappointed advocates for scientific research, even as it called for hefty increases for several key programs in the physical sciences aimed at continuing the president's drive to double such spending. While they applaud that goal, academic leaders are troubled by the fact that the administration's budget plan, if adopted, would result in a reduction…
drorzel | February 1, 2007Via Eurekalert a poll of American attitudes toward science confirms that people are a little confused about the whole science thing. I think the most concise desription of the problem is in the second sentence:
Most (87%) rate being a scientist as one of the most prestigious careers, yet 75% can't name a living scientist.
Yep. That's your problem, right there.
(As an aside, am I the only one who sees the name of the group that conducted the study, Research!America, and thinks:
Research!America = (Reasearch)(Research-1)(Research-2)...(2)(1)(America) ?
(I am? Oh, good.)
drorzel | January 24, 2007An article came through my RSS feeds yesterday that looked for all the world like the New York Times was copying our Basic Concepts idea. Labelled as "Basics," it promised to provide a general discussion of the concept of time. "You bastards!" I thought.
The actual article by Natalie Angier isn't all that similar to what you'll get from Basic Concepts posts on ScienceBlogs, taking much more of a humanities-major kind of approach, and giving a wide and fluffy survey of different concepts of time. It's still an interesting read, though.
drorzel | January 17, 2007A couple of quick stories off Physics Web:
First, they have a short article about a record-breaking cat state. This is a state in which a group of researchers have maneged to "entangle" six photons so that they are either all polarized vertically, or all polarized horizontally. This breaks the previous record of five entangled photons, and is interesting mostly because it's getting to the system size where you can start thinking about using these entangled photons to transmit quantum information and do quantum error correction.
There's also a lovely "artist's conception" picture, reproduced…
drorzel | January 9, 2007Over at Page 3.14, Katherine highlights a Psychology Today article about the different approaches young men and women have to dating. It's more or less what you expect, but for one eye-popping sentence (emphasis added):
[New Mexico psychology professor Geoffrey] Miller believes boys actually overestimate their mate value during adolescence, and none more so than jocks. "Young men who were captains of the football team graduate thinking they're God's gift to women, and women respond, 'I'm interested in corporate attorneys and well-cited professors. Who the hell are you?' "
Yeah, I really…