Author: Matthew R. Francis
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Ice volcanoes (and other mysteries) on Pluto!
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] Does Pluto Have Ice Volcanoes? That’s what some scientists believe. And it might have a heart, too For The Daily Beast: At the 47th Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS)…
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Be very very quiet, we’re hunting gravitational waves
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] Gravitational waves and where to find them Advanced LIGO has just begun its search for gravitational waves For Symmetry Magazine: For thousands of years, astronomy was the province of…
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Meet the glueball, the missing Standard Model particle
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] Glueballs are the missing frontier of the Standard Model There should be particles made entirely of gluons, but we don’t know how to find them For Ars Technica: The…
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Can we recognize life if we see it on other worlds?
Back in June, I traveled to a remote lake in British Columbia to visit a NASA research site. That trip resulted in a long article I wrote for Mosaic, which roamed over a wide range of topics: what a Canadian lake has to do with life on Mars, the difficulty of identifying life on other…
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A tribute to a great African-American planetary scientist
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] Meet Claudia Alexander, NASA Badass Who Never Got Her Due In a field dominated by white men, Claudia Alexander was a pioneer For The Daily Beast: Comet 67P/Churyumov—Gerasimenko is…
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What’s the deal with Google’s quantum computer?
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] Google and NASA Team Up on Quantum Computer The next generation of computers is a few years off, but it’s pretty damn cool For The Daily Beast: It’s like…
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Traces of salty water on Mars … and more mysteries!
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] Water Found on Mars Could Be First Signs of Martian Life NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter found traces of water that comes and goes on Mars—aka flowing water For The…
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The white scientist versus the African teenager
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] A Rationalist’s Irrationality Why is Richard Dawkins such a jerk? For Slate: Richard Dawkins is not your garden-variety Internet troll. He’s a retired professor at Oxford University and the…
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Of GUTs, glory, and the death of a proton
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] Do protons decay? Is it possible that these fundamental building blocks of atoms have a finite lifetime? For Symmetry Magazine: The stuff of daily existence is made of atoms,…
Bowler Hat Science 