Month: September 2012
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The bald(ing) truth about laser hair-restoration treatments
I admit, I love flipping through SkyMall when I’m on airplanes. However, the catalog is chock-full of pseudoscience, as with today’s entry in “As Seen on TV!”, my occasional feature over at Double X Science. (Warning: contains my balding scalp.) Ah, lasers. They may not have the mystique of magnets or the nous of “natural”, […]
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High-resolution image of supermassive black hole shows engine of destruction
A collection of four big telescopes in Arizona, California, and Hawaii have banded together to examine one of the biggest black holes we know: the beast at the heart of the galaxy M87. What they found: the disk of gas driving M87’s huge jet rotates the same direction as the black hole that made it. […]
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Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup
The Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (XDF) survey is the result of over 10 years of data, observing a single patch of sky roughly 1/15 the size of the full Moon (2 arcminutes, for the experts). The image encompasses 22.5 days worth of exposure time (though not all at once!), with the Hubble Space Telescope aimed […]
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Could quasars be standard candles?
Quasars are some of the brightest objects in the Universe—powerful jets emanating from supermassive black holes as they gorge on gas. However, their light is irregular, both varying in brightness between different quasars and fluctuating in time. A new analysis may have found regularities within those fluctuations, which might allow them to be used as […]
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Building quantum computations from a single electron spin
I’m currently in San Francisco for my younger brother’s wedding, but that doesn’t stop me from providing science content to you, dear readers. (Ahem.) Researchers have figured out a way to read and manipulate the quantum spin state of a single electron—a classic example in quantum computing that up until now has existed only in […]
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Hasta la Vesta, con agua
(Yes, my Spanish sucks.) The Dawn mission found signs of volatile materials—including water and elemental hydrogen—on the surface of the asteroid Vesta. Since Vesta is likely the source of a particular type of meteorite on Earth, the presence of volatiles was surprising, but intriguing. Vesta is remarkably like the terrestrial worlds (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, […]
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The galaxy from the dawn of time
The first galaxies in the Universe probably played a major part in reionization—the event in which primordial gas was turned into a plasma. However, observations of this era are very hard: we’re looking back in time to when the first stars formed, over 95% of the total age of the Universe. As a result, the […]
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The Dark Energy Camera takes its first images
I had the privilege of visiting Fermilab in May, as part of my research for my book-in-progress. While I was there, I got to see the test rig for the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), which looks like something from Stargate or the wormhole entrance from Contact. Unfortunately for me, the camera itself had already been […]
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Ships on a quantum sea
My latest post at Galileo’s Pendulum tests a way to explain quantum field theory to non-scientists, which I hope to put in my book-in-progress. Please go read the post, and let me know what you think! Just as a ship moving through still water produces a wake, electrons create ripples in the ambient electromagnetic field. […]
Bowler Hat Science 