science
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Margarine: A Public and Personal History
When I think of sitting at the kitchen table as a child eating dinner, I don’t have memories of luscious homemade foods.
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Spotlight: Perrin Ireland
Perrin Ireland’s work combines art with science, using shape and color to tell visual stories about cerebral subjects like microbiomes and the Higgs-Boson particle.
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Science: Still Confusing, Still Important
Some scientific experiments can sound ridiculous, especially to us writerly types—like, for instance, a study measuring mosquitoes’ attraction to limburger cheese. There’s even a fake prize dedicated to mocking such studies: the “Ig Nobel,” which the aforementioned mosquito story won…
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Academia’s Biggest Fraud Comes Clean
What happens when you put a well-regarded social psychologist fixated on order in an academic system that rewards breakthrough experiments over failed ones? You get one of the biggest con jobs in academic history. The New York Times Magazine profiles Diederik Stapel, whose…
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Field Trip to the Earthquake Lab, 2010
The plan was not to cause an earthquake. The USGS would tell you that this is nearly impossible. They would tell you that humans are just too insignificant to affect the seismicity of our planet.
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Reminder of the Importance of NASA
Glasses, extra light wheelchairs, satellite technology, and even moon boot technology in KangaROOs. But even more impressive is NASA’s ability to get Gloria Steinem and Charlton Heston in the same room. Just a few days after many were disappointed by…
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Tracking Quakes
I’d lived in California for over six years and still hadn’t experienced a quintessential California quake, still hadn’t come close to what Schopenhauer might call the “dynamic sublime,” the encounter with something powerful enough to destroy you.
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The Blame Game
Scientists have been putting the blame on almost everyone when it comes to climate change and subsequent natural disasters. In L’Aquila, Italy, however, the tables have turned as six scientists and one government official potentially face six years in prison…
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Sending Vibes Through Squids
BoingBoing documents the research of Backyard Brains, which, as of late, has consisted of monitoring how playing Cyprus Hill affects a squid’s chromatophores. The results look not unlike an iTunes Visualizer: “Greg Gage of the DIY neuroscience company Backyard Brains stimulated the axons…
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A History of Mars Exploration
Last night, NASA’s Curiosity rover landed on the surface of Mars, beginning its year long exploration of the planet. The Guardian has compiled a short history of Mars musing, which highlights scientists’ fascination with the planet. Since their first sightings in…
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Look Closer
Yesterday marked the fortieth anniversary of the launch of Landsat, America’s longest running Earth-imaging satellite program. Since the NASA-run program began in 1972, Landsat has captured more than three million images of our planet. To look at some particularly stunning…
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‘The The Angels Angels’ & Other Astrophysicist Baseball Observations
Neil deGrasse Tyson (Astrophysicist, American Museum of Natural History. Author: Space Chronicle, The Pluto Files. Host: StarTalk Radio) on Baseball: > Tonight’s @AllStarGame compells me to Tweet what Baseball looks like through the lens of an astrophysicist… > In the 1960s, when we…