Category: Writing for Other Sites
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Did Einstein ever write his most famous equation?
Albert Einstein is many people’s archetype of the genius scientist, and his most famous equation is E = mc2. Or is it? When you look at Einstein’s published scientific papers over decades of work, he didn’t (usually) write the equation in that form. In fact, he pointed out that was an inaccurate form, since it’s…
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The real poop on human digestion
I won’t lie: I love Mary Roach‘s books. She is likely the funniest nonfiction writer working today; her beat is the weird side of science. I reviewed her most recent book, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, for Double X Science: Consider this question a 6-year-old might ask: Why doesn’t the stomach digest itself? After…
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Was the Big Bang actually the beginning?
I usually avoid the kinds of sexy big questions that often make cosmology books by Paul Davies or Stephen Hawking or Roger Penrose popular. The main reason for that is because those big questions may not be answerable, because they are beyond the reach of our telescopes or experiments. One such question—what, if anything, came…
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What goes up, must come down…except maybe antimatter
Gravity is a universally attractive force, at least as far as we can tell. However, some physicists have posited that antimatter behaves the opposite way, as though they have negative mass. Testing that hypothesis is remarkably hard, though: antimatter particles annihilate with their regular matter partners if they encounter each other (at low speeds at…
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General relativity holds up under extreme gravity test
The general theory of relativity is the reigning champion of gravitational theories: it’s withstood tests in the Solar System, near black holes, and in binary systems. Most recently, astronomers performed detailed observations of a pulsar-white dwarf binary system, which provided an exquisite example of general relativity in action. Pulsars and white dwarfs are both the…
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I went to a rocket test launch, and all I got was this stupid name tag
Most major American rocket launches have been from Florida, which means I’ve never had a real opportunity to see one. However, NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility is beginning to host orbital rocket launches, in collaboration with the private company Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS). (Historically, Wallops has launched suborbital rockets and balloons.) So, I trekked over to…
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Who names the exoplanets? Who gets to decide?
The New Yorker recently started “Elements”, a science and technology blog. Their most recent contributor is…me! I covered a strange little controversy begun when the International Astronomical Union (IAU), a professional society with over 10 thousand members, decided to pick a fight with a company offering a contest to name exoplanets. That company, Uwingu, decided…
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Green Peas were all my joy, galaxies were my delight
Most galaxies are somewhat red or blue in appearance, depending on the populations of stars that comprise them. However, citizen scientists working with the GalaxyZoo project identified a previously unknown type of galaxy: Green Peas, so named because they are small and green. The color comes from ionized oxygen, a particular form of emission that…
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Yvonne Brill and the technology keeping satellites in orbit
In a certain sense, it’s easy to keep things in orbit around Earth. However, it’s hard to keep satellites in a specific orbit, which is what matters most for communicating with them and they with us, whatever task they’re designed to perform. Thanks to the work of rocket engineer Yvonne Brill in the early 1970s,…
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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…
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