Author: Matthew R. Francis
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[Extremely Boyz II Men Voice] The End of the Blog
![[Extremely Boyz II Men Voice] The End of the Blog](https://bowlerhatscience.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/black-vultures.jpg?w=800)
Blogging? What’s that? The new hotness is newsletters. Which is to say, I’m shuttering the Bowler Hat Science blog, where I post links to new articles I’ve written. The number of readers of this blog has never been high, and when I took a poll a while back, a fair number of my social media…
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A tangled tale of worm jello
The linked article is for SIAM News, the magazine for members of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). As such, I included some mathematical content, but I tried to write the piece so that you could gloss over that bit without losing the gist of the story. This particular article has a lot…
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Space barons’ dreams of space resemble nightmares
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] Musk and Bezos Offer Humanity a Grim Future in Space Colonies For Scientific American: A million inhabitants live in the city under the soft pink sky of Mars, just…
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Predicting heatwaves with machine learning
The linked article is for SIAM News, the magazine for members of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). As such, I included some mathematical content, but I tried to write the piece so that you could gloss over that bit without losing the gist of the story. In any case, this is an…
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Hate the game, not the playa
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] Here’s why the geometric patterns in salt flats worldwide look so similar The shared geometry across playas may come from fluid flows underground For Science News: From Death Valley…
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Is there life on Maaaaaars?
Even with our best laboratory equipment, we can’t always identify life on Earth, where we know it exists. This means we can’t answer the question about life on Mars.
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AI art is popular, but it is ethical?
The linked article is for SIAM News, the magazine for members of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). However, even though the main audience for this magazine is professional mathematicians, this article contains no mathematics whatsoever, but does contain possibly the worst pun I ever have contributed to a published article. [ This…
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Whip it good: how flagella help cells move
The linked article is for SIAM News, the magazine for members of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). However, even though the main audience for this magazine is professional mathematicians, I wrote it to be understandable even if you gloss over the math. [ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent…
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Modeling tuberculosis from molecules to organs
The linked article is for SIAM News, the magazine for members of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). However, even though the main audience for this magazine is professional mathematicians, I wrote it to be understandable even if you gloss over the math. [ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent…
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Dropping science like Galileo dropped the orange
Over the past few years, the MICROSCOPE spacecraft performed precision experiments to test the difference between gravitational mass, which governs how strongly matter responds to gravity, and inertial mass, which is the measure of resistance to being pushed. Our modern theory of gravity, Einstein’s general theory of relativity, says these masses are equivalent, which is…
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