March 2012
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February 2012
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Found Time: How To Spend The 24 Hours Of Leap Day... →
npr:
An extra day. How will you use it? Start by reading our hour-by-hour guide. Here’s a sample:
Feb. 29, 2012, Hour By Hour:
Midnight. Too excited to sleep, you can click on the fascinating site of the Long Now Foundation, timekeepers of the 10,000 Year Clock. Computer wizard Danny Hillis first dreamed up the idea of a massive timepiece that “ticks once a year. The century hand ...
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TED2012: It's Happening, Here's How To Follow →
TED2012 hits the stage this week in Long Beach, CA. The theme this year is Full Spectrum.
Since none of us make enough money to actually register for it, you can follow the live action on Twitter at @TEDNews.
Have you seen this year’s program? It’s amazing. There’s too many great folks to mention individually, but here’s my favorites:
Physicist Brian Greene
...
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“Space exploration is a force of nature unto itself that no other force in...”
– Neil deGrasse Tyson, discussing his new book Space Chronicles and why exploring space still matters (via crookedindifference)
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Teller Reveals His Secrets →
Have magicians been inadvertently studying neuroscience for ages? Teller, of Penn & Teller, weighs in:
“Magic is an art, as capable of beauty as music, painting or poetry. But the core of every trick is a cold, cognitive experiment in perception: Does the trick fool the audience? A magician’s data sample spans centuries, and his experiments have been replicated often enough to...
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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...
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“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)
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“Science is an inherent contradiction — systematic wonder — applied to the...”
– From Systematic Wonder: A Definition of Science That Accounts for Whimsy
via Brain Pickings
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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.
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la-boh3mienne-deactivated201205 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:
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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?...
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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?
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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.
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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...
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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,...
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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.
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WatchNanopore DNA Sequencing
Does that mean anything to you? It should. People who know me know that I am prone to hyperbole (e.g. “This is the best freakin’ sandwich I have ever had, like, in history”), but believe me when I say that This. Changes. Everything.
Critics of genomics (even Craig Venter, “Mr. Genome” himself) have lamented the fact that sequencing our genome...
