Asides
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Dinosaurs belong to all of us
My review of Brian Switek’s forthcoming book, My Beloved Brontosaurus, is up at Double X Science! Suffice to say, these are not the dinosaurs I learned about as a young kid—and in my opinion, they’re much more interesting. Over the last few decades, the basic realization that modern birds are living dinosaurs has grown, and…
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A Manly conversation
Writer/editor David Manly posed a series of questions to scientists and writers, soliciting short responses on topics of broad interest. Those interviewed were shark researcher David Schiffman, paleontology writer/sauropod snogger Brian Switek, and me. If you want to know who would win an arm-wrestling contest between a human and a Tyrannosaurus, or how we know…
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Disentangling environmental influences in photon-atom interactions
Often in physics, we can separate the object from the environment and the experimental apparatus from what’s being measured, but that separation is approximate. In quantum systems, those distinctions break down, to the point where the environment “measures” the system, in ways we don’t fully understand even after nearly a century of study. (A lot…
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Aging binaries provide new calibration for cosmic distances
Cosmology—the study of the Universe as a whole—requires accurate measurements of the distances to galaxies and other objects billions of light-years away. However, the reliability of those estimates depends on how accurately we know the distance to closer objects, such as the Milky Way’s satellite galaxy known as the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). A new…
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The case of the missing black holes
No question: supermassive black holes get a lot of the glory, thanks to their obvious presence at the centers of many galaxies. However, stars more than 20 times the mass of our Sun leave behind smaller, stellar-mass black holes after their violent supernova deaths. Despite this model’s wide acceptance, astronomers have only identified about 50…
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Living planets in a stellar graveyard
When our Sun runs out of nuclear fuel, it will shed its outer layers, while what’s left of the core will remain as a white dwarf: an object the size of Earth, but far more massive. During the final stages of the Sun’s life, Earth is likely to perish as a habitable world, but that’s…
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Measuring the spin of a black hole using X-rays
The region near a black hole is one of the most extreme environments in the Universe, but historically it’s been hard to study directly. Using the XMM-Newton and NuSTAR telescopes, astronomers have measured the rotation of gas near the supermassive black hole at the center of the Great Barred Spiral Galaxy. They found that this…
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Will we ever know the identity of dark matter?
Forgive me if I get excited for a moment, but…today marks my first contribution to BBC Future! The feature I contributed is part of the “Will we ever?” series, in which science writers ask some big questions about what research may or may not be able to answer in the future. My article pondered whether…
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Electron, heal thyself! Making curved electron beams go around barriers
Electron beams, like light, spread out when they pass through an opening. Even highly focused beams such as lasers spread over large distances, a result of the wave character of light. However, by manipulating the wave form near its source, researchers can create something known as an Airy beam, which doesn’t disperse—and in fact follows…
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New exoplanet is smaller and hotter than Mercury
We often focus on the search for Earth-like planets (whatever that means) when we talk about exoplanets: planets orbiting other stars. However, another important goal is to categorize as many planetary systems as possible, determining what kind of planets orbit what sort of stars. That catalog is gradually revealing the way planets form, and how…
Bowler Hat Science 