Enjoying the free WiFi at the Carnegie Science Center
The water table in the lobby has been redesigned since our last visit. Great big Tesla coil, in a great big Faraday cage.
WHO: Cell phone use can increase possible cancer risk – CNN.com
Neurosurgeon and CNN chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta says Tuesday’s announcement, “dealt a blow to those who have long said, ‘There is no possible mechanism for cell phones to cause cancer.’ By classifying cell phones as a possible carcinogen, they also seem to be tacitly admitting a mechanism could exist.” Manufacturers of many popular…
NASA’s Spirit Rover Completes Mission on Mars
If by “completes mission” you mean “makes us all sad by dying,” well, okay. It is not scientific or logical that I am sad because a cool little robot is dead on another planet, but it is human. This press release from NASA suggests that PR professionals are also apparently living on another planet, where…
‘Tears in Space Don’t Run Down Your Face’ : Discovery News
That line sounds like the title of a great blues song. The second verse isn’t quite so poetic. “Tears in space don’t run down your face,” he said, according to lead spacewalk officer Allison Bollinger who described the problem Feustel encountered when out on the spacewalk with astronaut Mike Fincke. “They actually kind of conglomerate…
Virtual Possessions Have Powerful Hold On Teenagers
This is one of those “duh” studies, like “doctors who are totally stoned more mistakes in the operating room than doctors who are not,” but I do understand the value of conducing formal research to quantify cultural information. “A house is just a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more…
Nature’s Living Tape Recorders May Be Telling Us Secrets
Posting this to share with students interested in The Hunger Games, which features birds genetically engineered to act as spies. Many birds can mimic sounds but lyrebirds are the masters. They are nature’s living tape recorders, and sometimes their songs can be troubling. For example, when the BBC’s David Attenborough ran into a lyrebird deep…
The incredible floating fire ant
Creepy-cool description of emergent behavior in ant colonies — complex survival strategies that develop when relatively dumb individual insects interact with each other in surprisingly complex ways. Back in the lab, Mlot deposited colonies of 500 to 8,000 ants in large beakers. When gently swirled, each colony spontaneously formed a sphere. Mlot dropped these spheres…
The Blue Marble Shot: Our First Complete Photograph of Earth – Atlantic Mobile
The incredible story behind an image we’ve all seen hundreds of times, possibly the most reproduced photograph in history It’s an iconic image we have all seen hundreds of times, possibly thousands, and probably the most widely reproduced photograph in history. Because it’s in the public domain it has been used for everything from car…
What Comes First: Depression In Teens Or Emo Music?
Interesting exploration of correlation vs. causation, on a topic that will likely appeal to freshmen. They called 106 teenagers on special cellphones as many as 60 times over eight weeks and asked what they were doing. About half of the teens had been diagnosed with clinical depression by a psychiatrist. When called, the teenagers reported…
Oh, that’s how you do a science fair project!
Jeez, kids these days. Not satisfied to merely participate in wildly cool science fairs and competitions sponsored by tech industry giants, now they’re teaching us what we did wrong on our own science fair projects, oh so many years ago. At least that’s what Kevin Temmer managed to do, all in a video which Pearson…
Stink bugs meet their nemesis in Asian wasp
Someone needs a basic geometry lesson. Brown marmorated stink bugs lay especially beautiful egg clusters — sea green with exactly 27 to 28 eggs in each mass. The assemblage of eggs looks a little like a one-dimensional view of a stack of cannon balls. Stink bugs meet their nemesis in Asian wasp – USATODAY.com. A…
NASA prepares a Mercury probe for orbit
NASA’s Messenger probe is about 10 days away from parking in an elliptical orbit around Mercury, the innermost planet of our solar system. Messenger has been en route since 2004, making a crazy Spirograph-looking series of orbits around the sun, taking the craft past Venus, and past Mercury three times, and finally heading for orbit…
MIT Scientist Captures 90,000 Hours of Video of His Son’s First Words, Graphs It
From the day he and his wife brought their son home five years ago, the family’s every movement and word was captured and tracked with a series of fisheye lenses in every room in their house. The purpose was to understand how we learn language, in context, through the words we hear. MIT Scientist Captures…
Exclusive: NASA Scientist Claims Evidence of Alien Life on Meteorite
Let’s see what the peer review process does to this claim. In what he calls “a very simple process,” Dr. Hoover fractured the meteorite stones under a sterile environment before examining the freshly broken surface with the standard tools of the scientist: a scanning-electron microscope and a field emission electron-scanning microscope, which allowed him to…
Best Film on Newton’s Third Law. Ever.
I just subscribed to this guy’s YouTube channel.
Looking for a book following the “life” of four atoms
Some years ago I picked up a nonfiction book that I think begins with the creation of four atoms in a supernova, and follows the path of these atoms as one becomes part of a new star, one becomes part of a life form, one falls into a black hole, etc. For some reason my…
Science Fair Victory
In this photo from the front page of today’s Latrobe Bulletin, my daughter explains her “Endangered Art” science project for the judges. She created numerous identical paintings, kept a control in a safe place, and exposed the others to various threats (sunlight, temperature change, the grubby fingers of children).
NASA's Extreme Planet Makeover
This is my “Super Earth,” about 2.75 times the volume of our planet, orbiting very close to a wimpy Class M star. (Thanks for the link, Jefe.)
From Fish to Infinity
Yesterday, my eight-year-old said, “I don’t like math, but I’m good at it.” This is a huge improvement from the math-related tug-of-wars we’ve encountered almost daily for the past year and a half. Yesterday, she also finished a “Star Wars Math” game, where the idea is to play a Trivial Pursuits style game, spaced-out versions…
Chimp "Girls" Play With "Dolls" Too–First Wild Evidence
As my 12-year-old son gets ready to surpass my six-foot height any day (his lip needs a third shave, but he’s apparently in no rush to graduate away from calling me “Daddy”) and as my 8-year-old navigates a peer community that includes mean girls and true friends, gallant young gentlemen (thank you, little boy who…