Category: Galileo’s Pendulum
-
The priors don’t lie: all the ladies love Bayesian statistics
Statistics is rarely sexy, sometimes satisfying, occasionally misused, but useful enough that more people should know how to use it than do. (Insert obvious condom joke here.) However, a particular method in statistics got additional attention last fall during the United States national elections: Bayesian inference. I wrote two pieces last week, drawing from a…
-
Death of a white dwarf, 10 billion years later
White dwarfs are the remnants of the cores of stars like our Sun. They have the mass of a star packed into the volume of Earth, but when they die, their light can be detected across the observable Universe. Researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope identified the farthest white dwarf supernova yet seen, one which…
-
Much ado about nothing in today’s dark matter non-announcement
OK, I might be feeling a little cranky about this, but my article for Ars Technica is a little more measured. I’ll have a longer analysis for Galileo’s Pendulum tomorrow, for those who want it. The short version: the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-02) is a particle detector installed on the International Space Station. For several…
-
Planck: news from the infant Universe
For cosmology-lovers like me, yesterday was a full, busy day. The Planck telescope released its first full set of data, refining the estimates of the age of the Universe and its contents. I wrote two big pieces, one for Ars Technica and one for Galileo’s Pendulum. First Planck results: the Universe is still weird and…
-
“A” is for axion
Originally posted on Galileo's Pendulum: Wot’s all this, now? Today I begin a new feature, which I will try to update once a week: the Alphabet of Cosmology. In these entries, I’ll highlight a concept, experiment, or observation in cosmology—the study of the history, contents, and evolution of the Universe—that may not be as…
-
Happy birthday, Carl Sagan!
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. – Carl Sagan, born November 9, 1934 Like many science writers, I count Carl Sagan as one of my inspirations and influences. However, I think there’s a tendency to mourn his absence (he died relatively young) in the wrong way: by negatively contrasting current science communicators with…
-
Alpha Centauri harbors an Earth-mass planet
Every exoplanet discovery seems to bring us closer to understanding the variety of planetary systems out there in our galaxy. The latest find is particularly exciting: an Earth-mass planet orbiting around Alpha Centauri B, one of three stars in the closest system to the Solar System. The planet isn’t very Earthlike in most respects, but…
-
Happy Ada Lovelace Day!
For Ada Lovelace Day, I compiled a list of many of the best science writers I know: Last year, I celebrated Emmy Noether, perhaps the greatest mathematician of the 20th century. This year (largely because I’m swamped with other work), I’m stealing a great idea from Ed Yong, and celebrating living writers who are my…
Bowler Hat Science 