Science
carlyo | December 27, 2013Popular Science magazine -- one of the leading sources of news in technology, science, gadgets, space, green tech and more -- is returning as a key Media Partner with the Festival, bringing to the event not only a vast array of science media expertise, but also a special surprise: famed DIYer-at-large and zombie hunter, Chris Hackett, who is a contributing editor of Popular Science and who also hosted the Science Channel's avant garde DIY show, "Stuck With Hackett"!
Popular Science has been a major source of science and technology news since this award-winning publication was founded back in…
pharyngula | December 27, 2013What does it take to get Carl Zimmer to review your research in the New York Times?
I suppose it helps to be at Harvard. It also helps to have a combination of subjects — evolution and the human brain — that Zimmer has written about in the past. It helps to have a paper with lots of very pretty diagrams — the authors' hypothesis is professionally illustrated. It's also a good idea to have a vast sweeping explanation for the exceptionalism of the human brain. In this case, they call it the Tethering Hypothesis, and it's supposed to explain how humans evolved all these remarkable cognitive…
esiegel | December 27, 2013"Never waste your time trying to explain who you are to people who are committed to misunderstanding you." -Dream Hampton
Perhaps no word in the English language generates as much misunderstanding as the word theory. In scientific circles, this word has a very specific meaning that's different from everyday use, and -- as a theoretical astrophysicist myself -- I feel it's my duty to help explain exactly what we mean when we use it. In this week’s Ask Ethan column, I'm pleased to pull out of our question/suggestion box the question of Ripley, who asks:
I often see that because there is no "100…
oracknows | December 26, 2013And now for something completely different...
Unfortunately, it's all too easy to find new woo-filled claims or dangerous, evidence-lacking trends to write about. Heck, I did it just last week. Examining certain other health-related issues from a science-based perspective is more difficult, but I feel obligated to do it from time to time, not just for a change of pace but to stimulate the synapses and educate myself—and, I hope, you as well—about areas outside of my usual expertise. As much as I enjoy bringing a science-based perspective to topics like cancer quackery, vaccines, and all…
drorzel | December 22, 2013I've seen a bunch of links to this interview with Peter Aldhous, mostly focusing on this quote:
I think for most science journalists, their model of journalism is explanatory. It’s taking the arcane world of the high priests and priestesses of science and translating what they do into language the ordinary mortal can understand. And I think that’s incredibly valuable and very important if we’re to have an informed society. But it is a different mindset from thinking that part of your job is to keep an eye on these guys and check that science isn’t being used and abused, that there isn’t…
drorzel | December 20, 2013While we were in Florida last weekend, we got a bunch of snow at home, so we came home to the proverbial winter wonderland. It's warmed up quite a bit since, though, and stuff is now melting. When I got home this morning after doing a bunch of revisions to the book-in-progress, I looked out the kitchen window to see the scene in the "featured image" above, which I will duplicate below:
Snow hanging off the edge of SteelyKid's playset.
That's the snowpack from the top of SteelyKid's playset, now melting, just barely hanging on from sliding off the edge of the plastic cloth stretched over…
carlyo | December 19, 2013By Stacy Jannis
Kavli Science Video Contest Manager
The Kavli Science in Fiction Video Contest challenges Gr 6-12 students to examine the science in fiction, including science fiction movies, TV shows, and games. Our contest advisors include science educators , scientists, and Hollywood scifi visual effects experts.
Sebastian Alvarado is a postdoctoral fellow in the Dept. of Biology at Stanford, with a research focus on epigenetics, as well as co-founder of the video game science consultancy group, Thwacke! Consulting. Thwacke offers scientific insight from a diversity of disciplines to aid…
catdynamics | December 18, 2013What should a high school student do to get on a track to become an astrophysicist?
Reworked from a rework from an oldie.
Something prompted me to think it is time to lightly update and republish this series, possibly with added bonus parts!
So, you're in high school wondering what to do with yourself, and you think: "hey, I could be an Astrophysicist!"
So, what should YOU do, wanting to get into a good university and an astro/physics major?
1) Take all the math that is offered, and do well in it.
The limiting factor for most students wanting to do astronomy or astrophysics is poor math…
catdynamics | December 18, 2013An interesting new twist for the 223rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society will be the "Augmented Reality" poster - an instantiation of the very rapidly growing augmented reality features appearing everywhere through smartphone apps or google glass.
V838 Mon poster by Vogt et al
will have a layar augmentation:
[caption id="attachment_3642" align="aligncenter" width="200"] Vogt et al poster viewed through layar app on an iPhone
(click to embiggen)[/caption]
using layar creator, tags are added to the poster which pop up when viewed through the app providing links to sources, videos,…
drorzel | December 17, 2013We spent this past weekend in Florida, visiting Kate's mom and her husband, who moved down there in October. This was a huge hit with the kids, who were very excited to fly on an airplane (four of them, actually, as we changed planes in Baltimore both ways). They also got a big kick out of driving around in a rental car-- The Pip chattered happily about "My new car" for a while-- which we did a lot of, going to a beach and the Mote Aquarium in Sarasota.
Doing all that driving in a rented SUV and a state with a 70mph speed limit got me thinking about optimum driving speed. Particularly on the…
oracknows | December 9, 2013Three weeks ago, USA TODAY published an expose of the Burzynski Clinic by Liz Szabo that was devastating in its scope and detail. Early on, Stanislaw Burzynski and his minions tried to do some damage control, with hilarious results given how inept and unconvincing his excuses were for all the violations of ethics and patient care and abuse of clinical trials detailed by Szabo. Later, Burzynski presented some abstracts at the Society of Neuro-Oncology meeting in San Francisco. Let's just say that the case report and his reports of a phase 2 clinical trial were...similarly unimpressive. Overall…
carlyo | December 9, 2013By Stacy Jannis
Kavli Science Video Contest Manager
The Kavli Science in Fiction Video Contest challenges Gr 6-12 students to examine the science in fiction, including science fiction movies, TV shows, and games. Our contest advisors include science educators , scientists, and Hollywood scifi visual effects experts.
Steven Schlozman, M.D. is an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a staff child and adult psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, MA. He is also the co-director of Medical Student Education in Psychiatry for Harvard Medical School. His…
pharyngula | December 9, 2013I've been distracted lately — it's end of the world semester time — and so I didn't have time to comment on this recent PNAS paper that reports on dramatic sex differences in the brains of men and women. Fortunately, I can just tell you to go read Christian Jarrett, who explains most of the flaws in the study, or you can look at these graphical illustrations of the magnitude of the differences. I just want to add two lesser points.
First, let's all be really careful about the overselling of fMRI, 'k? It's a powerful tool, but it's got serious spatial and temporal resolution limitations, and…
esiegel | December 8, 2013“Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?” -Carl Sagan
It's a challenging thing, to admit to ourselves how vast and mysterious this Universe is, and how small and ignorant we all truly are. It can feel daunting and isolating to think about it, and solace can be difficult to find, as Mazzy Star can maybe help you related to as you listen to their wonderful song…
aardvarchaeology | December 6, 2013Ikea’s typhoon rescue relief outguns China’s. Nope. Not surprised that their government does not care much.
China Ends One-Child Policy.
“Viking-age” ‘gold men’ unearthed in Sweden”. Actually, a bit older than the Vikings...
When the workload grows too huge, I recommend a solution found in Terry Pratchett’s Pyramids. The pyramid engineer creates a time loop so different temporal versions of him can work in parallel. Literally “an army of me”.
The Welsh language must be perfect for writing sagas about ancient heroes battling it out.
Creepy White Guys and Asian Women” *shudders in disgust…
drorzel | December 4, 2013I know I said there weren't going to be physics posts for a while, but yesterday our Communications office passed along a media request about this paper on feedback cooling of BEC, from some sort of communications-person mailing list. I'd seen it talked up elsewhere-- here, for example, so I banged out an email to the reporter in question. Who didn't use any of my stuff in the story that ran late last night.
Having put in the work, though, I may as well get something out of it, so here's the email I sent. Questions in bold are from the original request. The paper is in the New Journal of…
oracknows | December 4, 2013As hard as it is to believe, I've been blogging nearly nine years. Indeed, my nine-year anniversary is coming up in just over a week. It's been almost a decade! Early on during near-decade that I've been laying down bits of Insolence, Respectful, and Not-So-Respectful, I developed an interest in the antivaccine movement. Antivaccinationism, "antivax," or whatever you want to call it, represents a particularly insidious and dangerous form of quackery because it doesn't just endanger the children whose parents don't vaccinate them. It also endangers children who are vaccinated, because vaccines…
oracknows | November 29, 2013Well, Thanksgiving's over, and the orgy of consumerism known as Black Friday is in full swing. Personally, I have to work, at least part of the day, and I don't go anywhere near the stores on Black Friday anyway. I haven't for years. So we might as well briefly discuss a bit of science today. It won't be long (by Orac standards), but there was a tidbit of news that hit the blogosphere on Thanksgiving Day that caught my interest. Apparently the execrable study by Gilles Séralini on the effect of using feed made from genetically modified organisms (GMOs) on rats is heading for retraction. You…
drorzel | November 27, 2013Dmitrii Ivanovich Mendeleev hit on the idea of the Periodic Table as an organizing theme for a textbook he began writing in 1868. He did some work on refining the idea, and in 1870 presented a paper on it to a meeting of the Russian Chemical Society.
Well, actually, that's not quite true-- Mendeleev did write up a paper for Russian chemists in 1870, but he didn't present it himself. He had a friend do the presentation in his stead. Mendeleev himself was out of town, inspecting artisanal cheese-making operations for the Russian government.
I talked a bit last week about Eureka moments and…
drorzel | November 26, 2013We had a very late colloquium talk on Monday-- on the next-to-last day of our fall term exam period, so student turnout was a little disappointing-- by the science historian Dieter Hoffmann from the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, who was in town visiting a colleague in our history department. He told us the story of Fritz Reiche, a student of Max Planck's whoc ended up having a Union College connection (which was a part of why Hoffmann wanted to give the talk).
Reiche did his Ph.D. under Planck, in 1907, then spent time at a few other great institutions in Germany,…