In the News
drorzel | October 9, 2007Having gotten that silly Medicine business out of the way, the Swedish Academy has moved on to the important Award, with the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics going to Albert Fert and Peter Grunberg for the discovery of Giant Magnetoresistance. This is one that people have been calling for for a while, now.
I'll try to give a more complete explanation of what this is and why it's important later, but I'm going to Boston with a student group today, and I need to run to catch the bus. I'll just note quickly that this should be applauded by blog readers, because GMR is an enabling technology for…
drorzel | October 8, 2007I somehow managed to lose track of time for a bit, and forgot that it was Nobel season until I saw this morning's announcement that the 2007 Nobel Prize in Medicine hase just been announced, going to Mario R. Capecchi, Sir Martin J. Evans, and Oliver Smithies,
for their discoveries of principles for introducing specific gene modifications in mice by the use of embryonic stem cells
Good thing they got the Nobel, because that sounds like the sort of icky, un-Godly work we wouldn't want to actually, you know, fund.
Anyway, the announcement of this prize means that the rest of the Nobels will be…
drorzel | October 4, 2007The Institute of Physics is the UK's main organization of physicists (sort of like the American Physical Society), and yesterday, they announced their awards for 2007. The full list of winners is only available as a Word file, for some odd reason, but it's a distinguished group.
The prizes are headed by the brand-new Isaac Newton medal, which was awarded to Anton Zeilinger of the University of Vienna for his pioneering work on the uses of quantum entanglement:
His achievements include the first demonstration of quantum communication based on the entanglement of photons in 1995, the first "…
drorzel | October 2, 2007Natalie Angier has a piece in the Times this morning about the loss of a beloved pet cat:
Cleo was almost 16 years old, she'd been sick, and her death was no surprise. Still, when I returned to a home without cats, without pets of any sort, I was startled by my grief -- not so much its intensity as its specificity.
It was very different from the catastrophic grief I'd felt when I was 19 and my father died, and all sense, color and flooring dropped from my days. This was a sorrow of details, of minor rhythms and assumptions that I hadn't really been aware of until, suddenly, they were…
drorzel | September 29, 2007From the "You Read Too Much SF" file: I was really disappointed by the press release that went with the headline:
Mysterious energy burst stuns astronomers
A headline like that really ought to involve bodies strewn about a remote observatory, and enigmatic alien forces roaming free, perhaps being hunted by menacing government agents. Sadly, it just refers to some sort of surprisingly large radio emitter in the very distant reaches of the universe.
drorzel | September 27, 2007The New York Times is commemorating the 50th anniversary of Sputnik with a huge clump of articles about, well, space. I'm a little surprised that I haven't seen more said about these-- they turned up in my RSS feeds on Tuesday, but I've been both busy and slightly ill, and haven't gotten around to blogging them until now. I guess it's further evidence that space is no longer inherently cool. That, or there are just too many damn biologists on my blogroll.
Anyway, there's a bunch of retrospective material that I didn't really bother with, along with four pieces with more of a current…
drorzel | September 26, 2007Physics World has a somewhat puzzling news article about the solar system:
Physicists have known for some time that the motions of Pluto and the inner planets are chaotic. This means that a small external force on a planet could, over time, cause a major change in the position of the planet within its orbit. Although no planets are likely to collide or be ejected from the Solar System anytime soon, the chaos means that the orbits of these planets cannot be forecasted with any long-term reliability.
Whether the orbits of the gas giants are chaotic, however, is less certain -- some computer…
drorzel | August 14, 2007I don't know if it's official enough for Wikipedia, but the college has posted a nice obituary for Ralph Alpher:
Alpher taught at Union from 1986 to 2004 and was director of the Dudley Observatory. He also spent more than 30 years at the General Electric Research and Development Center in Niskayuna.
In 1948, as a young doctoral student, he wrote the first mathematical model for the creation of the universe and predicted the discovery of cosmic background radiation that proves the Big Bang theory.
Hundreds of people showed up at George Washington University for his dissertation defense, but…
drorzel | August 13, 2007I am sorry to report the passing of Ralph Alpher, of the famous "Alpher-Bethe-Gamow" paper. I don't know many details, but he's been in poor health for some time, so this is sad but not surprising news.
Ralph Alpher was an astrophysicist and cosmologist whose thesis work with George Gamow on the origin of the universe was a critical early step in the development of the "Big Bang" theory. Alpher predicted the existence of the cosmic microwave background, and estimated its temperature (at 5K, not far from the correct value of 2.7 K) in 1948, nearly two decades before it was detected by Penzias…
drorzel | July 26, 2007There's a story about theft of supplies at NASA in the Times today. It's an eight-paragraph wire service blurb, which wouldn't be worth a mention, but for this:
In one instance documented by the accountability office, an unidentified worker explained the fate of a missing laptop, worth $4,265:
"This computer, although assigned to me, was being used on board the International Space Station. I was informed that it was tossed overboard to be burned up in the atmosphere when it failed."
That's absolutely brilliant. If you're going to steal overpriced laptops from the government, do it with style…
drorzel | July 12, 2007There's a new paper in Nature announcing the detection of water vapor in the atmosphere of a "hot Jupiter" orbiting a distant star. There's also a story on Physics Web and a press release from the Spitzer Telescope group, if you'd like some stuff you can read without a subscription to Nature.
The idea here is that the planet passes between its star and Earth every couple of days, causing a dimming of the light from the star. The researchers looked at the first part of that dimming, which is when the light is passing through the edge of the atmosphere, and measured the amount of light in a few…
drorzel | July 10, 2007The Paper of Record, unafraid to tackle the really important questions, today addresses the perennial favorite: Is it dangerous to stand near a microwave oven?
You'll be happy to know that the answer is still "No." I would've preferred "No, you dolt," but you take what you can get:
Although microwave ovens can in fact leak radiation, the levels that might be released are fairly minute.
According to the Center for Devices and Radiological Health, a unit of the Food and Drug Administration that regulates microwave oven safety, every microwave that reaches the market must meet a requirement…
drorzel | July 5, 2007Just in time to drive parents into a panic for the rest of the summer, the New York Times has a big article about sunscreen:
Dr. [James] Spencer [a dermatologist in Florida] said that an S.P.F. 15 product screens about 94 percent of UVB rays while an S.P.F. 30 product screens 97 percent. Manufacturers determine the S.P.F. by dividing how many minutes it takes lab volunteers to burn wearing a thick layer of the product by the minutes they take to burn without the product.
But people rarely get the level of S.P.F. listed because labels do not explain how much to use, said Dr. Vincent A. DeLeo…
drorzel | July 3, 2007There have been a number of true and non-silly stories about astronomy and cosmology recently, which I'll collect here as penance for the earlier silly post:
Some theorists at Penn State have constructed a Loop Quantum Gravity model that they claim allows for an oscillating universe with no singularities. In one of those psychology-of-the-press moments, the PSU press release accentuates the positive, with the headline "What happened before the Big Bang?" Meanwhile, the IOP Physics Web news item goes negative: "'Cosmic forgetfulness' shrouds time before the Big Bang" (referring to the model…
drorzel | July 2, 2007Between the concert last night and an afternoon cookout at the house of one of Kate's co-workers, we were out of the house for most of the day yesterday. This means light blogging today, as I struggle to deal with the stuff I really should've done yesterday.
I do want to note, though, the New York Times Magazine article on amateur inventors competing for NASA prizes:
When Peter K. Homer, an out-of-work director of a local community center in Maine, first heard that NASA was turning to America's backyard inventors to brainstorm new technologies for a possible return to the moon, he had an idea…
drorzel | June 29, 2007Steinn checks in from his Mediterranean vacation with not one, not two, but three reports from the conference on Extreme Solar Systems, and a hint of maybe more to come.
The big news here, as far as I can see, is that they're starting to find more low mass planets, and more planets with long orbital periods. These are both the result of technical improvements-- the sensitivity of the planet-finding techniques has improved as people get more practice, enabling more low-mass detections, and as Steinn puts it, "things are piling up at multi-year periods as the searches go on for long enough to…
drorzel | June 14, 2007As a science fiction fan, when I see a dramatic headline like Computer Flaw Could Imperil Space Station, I can't help thinking of murderous AI's. Sadly, the real problem is much more prosaic:
The [International Space Station] depends on Russian and American computer systems to maintain the attitude of the station as it orbits the earth. The United States computer system runs the network of gyroscopes that provide stability, and the Russian system controls thrusters that correct the orientation of the station when the gyroscopes alone cannot do the job and shift position for operations like…
drorzel | May 16, 2007One of the fun things about EurekAlert is that it allows you to trace the full life cycle of the publicization of science in a way that used to be impossible for a regular person. For example, take the recent "Ring of Dark Matter" story.
First, there's a rumor of a result. This first stage lasts about a week, and if all goes well, it manages to generate a little buzz, and maybe even some divination.
The rumor, warmed by the buzz, will then hatch, giving rise to a press release. Dependning on the species, you may get two, and for highly collaborative research, you can generate even more.
In…
drorzel | May 7, 2007Over in LiveJournal Land, James Nicoll is pining for the good old days:
I'm going through one of my "I would kill for some new SF" phases, SF in this case being defined in a narrow and idiosyncratic way. In particular, I want the modern version of those old SF stories where SF writers, having just read some startling New Fact [Black holes could be very small! Mercury isn't tide-locked! The Galilean moons are far more interesting than we thought!], would craft some thrilling tale intended to highlight whatever it was that the author had just learned.
I suspect this is mostly due to James's…
drorzel | April 25, 2007I have two labs on Tuesdays, which is even more exhausting than it sounds, so I went to be early last night. And woke up to find a whole new planet. You guys need to give me some warning about these things...
Anyway, the planet in question orbits a red dwarf star a mere 20 light years from Earth, has a mass of roughly five times that of Earth and an estimated radius half again Earth's (which would mean a bit more than double the surface gravity, for those planning to set SF stories there). It orbits its star in about 84 days, which seems pretty short, but is much slower then the previously…