Month: October 2012
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Jumping from the “edge of space”…whatever that means
Yesterday, Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner (best known for jumping off skyscrapers) successfully completed a 39 kilometer dive from a balloon. Many media outlets described his jump as beginning “at the edge of space”, but the story is a little more complex than that. One thing bothered me, though, about a lot of the coverage: many…
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The beautiful spiral of a dying star
Though it may seem sad on the surface, the death of a star is a beautiful thing—and an important precursor to the birth of new stars and planets. The Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile has provided a breathtaking view of a star nearing the end of its life. One unexpected feature was a…
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A Nobel Prize curmudgeon speaks out
The Nobel Prizes recognize good scientific achievements, but in many ways the attention they get is disproportionate to their value, and presents a false view of how science really works. Part of the problem instead is that the Nobel Prizes perpetuate the idea of a handful of Great Men (only two women have won the…
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Trapping particles leads to 2012 Nobel Prize in physics
The the winners of the 2012 Nobel Prize in physics were announced this morning: Serge Haroche and David J. Wineland. Their work involves trapping and measuring the quantum states of photons and ions, respectively: A major challenge is measuring the state of a quantum system without modifying it. On the macroscopic scale, we can generally…
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You may hate me, but don’t spread your lies to children
I take it personally when idiot politicians call me and my fellow scientists evil liars. My latest post at Galileo’s Pendulum explains why: Broun and his compatriots obviously think very bad things about me, my friends, and the work we do. They don’t just disagree or think we’re wrong, they think we’re literally in league…
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The darkness at the center of the galaxy
Since 1995, a team of astronomers led by Andrea Ghez has been studying the motion of stars near the center of the Milky Way. They just announced the discovery that one of those stars is the closest to the black hole yet, with an orbital period of about 11.5 years—short enough that they’ve been able…
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Just the facts, ma’am
“Must have facts,” said Lord Peter, “facts. When I was a small boy I always hated facts. Thought of ’em as nasty, hard things, all knobs. Uncompromisin’.” (from Clouds of Witness by Dorothy L. Sayers) My latest post over at Galileo’s Pendulum explains why I won’t be writing a book called “1,001 Mind-Blowing Facts About the…
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Spinning pulsar, got to slow down
(This headline was my original choice for the article, which was understandably rejected by my editors. So, you get to read it here instead.) Pulsars are rapidly-spinning neutron stars, the very small dense remnants of stars at least 8 times more massive than the Sun. Their pulses are intense beams of light that sweep across…
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Pore, pore, pitiful solar cells
There’s just one word for the ‘teens: plastics photovoltaics. A new experiment may have solved a problem in nanostructured silicon solar cells: a type of photovoltaic cell that uses pores to increase the effective surface area for collection of light. By separating the contribution by surface and interior recombination effects, the NREL study found that…
Bowler Hat Science 