Now on ScienceBlogs: Will Quantum Fusion Save the Day?
Outland It's Not: Billionaires Plan Asteroid Mining I'm about a week late talking about this, but I've mostly resigned myself to not doing really topical blogging these days. Anyway, there was a lot of excitement last week over the announcement that an all-star team of nerd billionaires...
Another Week of GW News, April 29, 2012 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup...
Weekend Diversion: Discover the Night Sky for Yourself! "They will see us waving from such great heights 'Come down now,' they'll say. But everything looks perfect from far away 'Come down now,' but we'll stay." -The Postal Service Whether you're under urban, city skies, where only a few...
Why Should There Be Dark Matter? "And what I wanted to do was, I wanted to explore problems and areas where we didn't have answers. In fact, where we didn't even know the right questions to ask." -Donald Johanson You can learn an awful lot about...
Tomorrow: Join us for the Woodstock of Science! The excitement is filling the air at Sneak Peek Friday today as we are gearing up for an amazing weekend! The Festival takes place Saturday from 10-6 and Sunday from 10-4 at the Walter E Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. Please visit our "Plan Your Day" section on our website for important information regarding attending this FREE event. Those attending the Festival will be in for quite a treat with over 3,000 hands-on science and engineering activities and over 150 stage shows!
Book Roundup: People Talking About Dog Physics I've been falling down on the shameless self-promotion front, lately, but that doesn't mean I'm not tracking How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog obsessively, just that I'm too busy to talk about it. Happily, other people have been nice...
Just Two Days Until the Largest Celebration of Science & Engineering! The 2nd USA Science & Engineering Festival has finally arrived! The Expo will take place this weekend at the Walter E Washington Convention Center in Washington, DC. The hours are Saturday from 10-6 and Sunday from 10-4. Evening shows are also scheduled for the weekend including the Stargazing Party with Bill Nye and Featured Author Panel Discussion- Science Stories in Society & School: Using Narrative to Bridge the Gap.
So, you've learned that the Sun is going to explode... "Through that last dark cloud is a dying star... And when it explodes, it will be reborn. You will bloom... and I will live." -The Fountain I want to start off by letting you all know that I, myself, do...
Historical Interdisciplinarity Examples? For something I'm working on, I'm trying to come up with good examples of interdisciplinarity making a difference in science. Specifically, I'm looking for cases where somebody with training in one field was able to make a major advance in...
The Sombrero is Two Galaxies in the Same Spot in the Universe The Sombrero Galaxy's Split Personality: The infrared vision of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has revealed that the Sombrero galaxy -- named after its appearance in visible light to a wide-brimmed hat -- is in fact two galaxies in one. It is a large elliptical...
Ten Years Before the Blog: 2003-2004 The schedule called for this to appear last Friday, but as I was just back from a funeral, yeah, not so much. I had already gone through and bookmarked a whole slew of old posts, though, so here's a recap...
Physics Day Poll: Favorite Physicist? Over in Twitter-land, there's a bunch of talk about how this is National Physics Day. I don't know how I missed that, what with all the media coverage and all. I have too much other stuff to do to generate...
When the fuel's all gone... "Some painters transform the Sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the Sun." -Pablo Picasso But the Sun will not always be a bright spot. Though it has shone for billions of years already, and will...
A Night of Celestial Excitement: Join Us April 28 at the Stargazing Party! Under the guidance of some of the top astronomy experts in the country, explore our amazing Universe - including up close views of the Earth's moon, Jupiter and other mysterious planetary objects - at the Stargazing Party, an exciting educational collaboration between the Festival, the Smithsonian's National Air & Space Museum (NASM), telescope manufacturer Celestron and other partners, on Saturday, April 28 at NASM in Washington, DC.
Did you hear that big giant meteor? Who says that if you scream in space no one will hear you? A rare daytime meteor was seen and heard streaking over northern Nevada and parts of California on Sunday, just after the peak of an annual meteor shower. Observers in the Reno-Sparks area...
Another Week of GW News, April 22, 2012 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup...
Weekend Diversion: Happy Earth Day, No Matter Where You Are "Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity - in all this vastness - there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to...
Welcome Earth Day with the Greatest April Shower of All: The Lyrids! "April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain." -T. S. Eliot Of course you all know the refrain, "April showers bring May flowers," but there's one...
Euler's Solution to the Basel Problem I'm in the mood for some math today, so here's an amusing little proof I recently showed to my History of Mathematics class. We shall derive the formula \[ \frac{\pi^2}{6}=1+\frac{1}{4}+\frac{1}{9}+\frac{1}{16}+\frac{1}{25}+\dots \] Note that the denominators of the fractions on the...
The Whole Story on Dark Matter "Science progresses best when observations force us to alter our preconceptions." -Vera Rubin I want you to think about the Universe. The whole thing; about everything that physically exists, both visible and invisible, about the laws of nature that they...
Tiny Visions: Capturing the Nanoscale in 3D New microscope stitches together thousands of images to create unparalleled insights into nature's tiniest objects.
More Physics of Sprinting Yesterday's post on applying intro physics concepts to the question of how fast and how long football players might accelerate generated a bunch of comments, several of them claiming that the model I used didn't match real data in the...
Weird Winter, Mad March I have not watched these yet myself, but will do as soon as I download and convert them for my iPhone, but I have no doubt they are up to Peter Sinclair's usual high standards. Embedded below are part's 1...
ESA makes a big choice The European Space Agency has made its selection for the next Large Mission to be flown by ESA, with a launch window in about 2022...
The Physics of Sprints and Kickoff Safety Over at Grantland, Bill Barnwell offers some unorthodox suggestions for replacing the kickoff in NFL games, which has apparently been floated as a way to improve player safety. Appropriately enough, the suggestion apparently came from Giants owner John Mara, which...
“That's why helium recycling is important. If I don't recycle my aluminum can, the problem isn't that we lose the aluminum from the earth, it's just that it will take more energy to get those atoms back into a useful form than if I recycled it. If I don't recycle my helium (and my guess is most users don't), the atoms eventually leave the planet.” Anonymous Coward on Why is Helium so Scarce?
Orac 04.13.2012
PZ Myers 06.17.2009
Orac 04.30.2012
Tim Lambert 09.12.2011
ERV 11.26.2011
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Some engineers use cranes and steel to make their designs reality, but synthetic biologists engineer using tools on a different scale: DNA and the other molecular components of living cells. Synthetic biology uses cellular systems and structures to produce artificial models based on natural order. Read these posts from the ScienceBlogs archives for more:
Pharyngula May 30, 2007
The Loom January 31, 2008
Discovering Biology in a Digital World July 2, 2006