February 2012
7 tags
Everything is Connected - Sean Carroll on Brian... →
Earlier this week, we were treated to rock star physicist Brian Cox explaining how everything in the universe is connected via the Pauli exclusion principle. If you haven’t seen it, go watch it so you’re up to speed.
The clip was from his “A Night With The Stars” televised lecture, which is something that would never make it on TV in the US, and that is sad.
In it, he...
4 tags
“We have landed on a world where the faint sun glints off methane lakes, seen...”
– Brian Cox, Why Quantum Theory Is So Misunderstood (via cuckoocuckoo)
7 tags
3 tags
“Science is an inherent contradiction — systematic wonder — applied to the...”
– From Systematic Wonder: A Definition of Science That Accounts for Whimsy
via Brain Pickings
5 tags
Would you guys all get horribly bored if I had a week where I did nothing but answer questions from my inbox?
Maybe like 4 days.
I need an intern.
2 tags
theoriaetverum asked: I really enjoy this blog a lot! It's awesome knowing there are other people out there that care about science as much as I do c:
2 tags
samcornwell asked: "Without Hertz, we wouldn’t have wi-fi, iPhones, radio, Kinect, remote controls for our TVs or really anything that sends a signal to something else." This sentence that you posted yesterday has been playing on my mind. Are you sure that without Hertz that radio waves would not have been discovered? Do you think this much time could have passed without the discovery of radio waves?...
5 tags
whiskeyandritalin asked: I don't understand how would a loose cable cause this experiment to be wrong? The cable was anticipated to have a 60 nanosecond delay right? If the cable was loose the delay could have been longer say for example 75 nanoseconds. Wouldn't that just mean that the neutrinos traveled faster than previously thought?
5 tags
7 tags
4 tags
2 tags
neuromatic replied to your photo: How Much Would It Cost to Build the Death Star? …
It’s cool we got this.
Maybe we could build a budget version, like instead of a “Death” Star, make it a “Hurts Really Bad” Star.
The Honda Civic of planetary destroyers.
4 tags
5 tags
7 tags
FTL Neutrino-no →
BREAKING NEWS: GPS Connector Error May Undo Faster-Than-Light Neutrino Results
ScienceInsider is reporting (from still unconfirmed sources) that last year’s reports of faster-then-light neutrinos from CERN’s OPERA collaborative were due to a mistake. Specifically, a bad connection between a computer and a GPS unit.
Whoops.
Confused? Here’s a handful of my posts on the subject...
4 tags
5 tags
5 tags
In the Steps of Ancient Elephants →
Brian Switek tells a story of a set of ancient tracks in what is now the UAE. They belonged to large prehistoric animals, and they were a mystery to us until only recently:
“One day, sometime around seven million years ago, a herd of bizarre, four-tusked elephants crossed the desert which stretched over what is now the United Arab Emirates. Thirteen of the behemoths plodded along together,...
5 tags
WatchMATTER, a new home for thrilling, in-depth, gripping science writing on the web.
It’s also a new Kickstarter project, and one that I support. Sure, I write a lot of short science content, and I think there’s a perfect home for it here, as a way to divert attention from the unimportant to the amazingness that surrounds us. A collection of enlightening and educational brain diversions.
...
6 tags
8 tags
5 tags
8 tags
5 tags
3 tags
New fun. and Sleigh Bells on the same day?
My ears are very happy today.
5 tags
Download The Universe - A New Kind of Review For A... →
A consortium of all my favorite science writers brings you “Download the Universe”, a project dedicated to reviewing the exploding number of science e-books available.
This isn’t for Kindle spin-offs of print books. It’s manuscripts, Kindle singles, self-published essays, iPad anatomy references … anything that’s specific to the e-book format.
5 tags
5 tags
5 tags
Where we came from:
10 YEARS: The amount of time that it took to sequence the first human genome, at a cost of $2.7 billion.
9.5 YEARS: The amount of time that it would take you to read the human genome, continuously, were it printed in a book. Oh, and that book would be the size of 200 Manhattan telephone books.
3 GIGABYTES: The amount of computer storage that one human genome takes up.
Where...
4 tags
6 tags
2 tags
ceci820 asked: Okay so I want to go to college to study Forensic Science and everyone I tell think I'm crazy. What do you think?
5 tags
Today in “Bringing Stuff Back From the Dead” Science News:
Ancient yeast found Incan tomb resurrected, scientists immediately use it to make booze: An Incan tomb was discovered in Quito, Ecuador in the 1980’s that housed more than a dozen well-adorned Incan corpses. They were surrounded by food and drink offerings in large clay urns, similar to more familiar Egyptian customs,...
4 tags
7 tags
5 tags
8 tags
4 tags
9 tags
Watch The Einstein Theory of Relativity - 1923
A German silent film from nearly a century ago that aims to explain the Great One’s theory to the common man and woman. For more on the film’s history.
(via Vimeo)
6 tags
There are 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 viruses in the world’s oceans.
Stretched end-to-end, they would reach 10,000,000 light years.
They weigh as much as 75,000,000 blue whales.
(random facts from UBC’s Curtis Suttle @ #AAAS Vancouver 2012)
6 tags
13 tags
7 tags
7 tags
5 tags
6 tags
bluepavements asked: What are your thoughts on Canada's new protocol requiring requests for interviews with scientists to be cleared by government officials?
8 tags
3 tags
2012 Shorty Award Microblog Nominations - Last... →
Last day to nominate, if you’d like to!
I love you all, and thank you for all your support.
jtotheizzoe:
Just a reminder in case you’d like to nominate me or any of the other great Tumblr Science Blogs for the Shorty Awards Best Microblog!
jtotheizzoe:
I love MythBusters as much as the next guy, but I don’t think we should let them win the Shorty Award for Science again this year. WE...