It's been the decade of metamaterials, with breakthroughs toward an invisibility cloak occurring every few months.   With conventional materials, light typically travels along a straight line, but with metamaterials, scientists can exploit additional flexibility to create blind spots by deflecting certain parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.  Basically, an image can be altered or made to look like it has disappeared. 

Under certain conditions vapor bubbles can form in fluids moving swiftly over a surface and those bubbles soon collapse with such great force that they can even poke holes in steel and damage objects such as ship propellers and fuel pumps.   

Warning! If you’re thinking this is going to be about gruesome punishments or such like, prepare to be disappointed! This is about teaching and learning electromagnetism.

Phil Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, had a life-changing event occur almost one year ago.   On November 19th, 2009, a thousand e-mail messages and documents, many his correspondence, were released to the public.

Many stressed that those messages were stolen(1), as if the process vindicated the content (would it do so if damning emails had been from Exxon or BP?) but that was small solace because climate science was already suffering backlash and climate science detractors had a field day alleging the entire process was tainted.

Lee Smolin claims that AP is bad and favors a Cosmological Natural Selection view instead (on grounds of falsifiability).  I believe this is a false dichotomy and that they are really one and the same.  Here’s why:

1. Normally natural selection requires some form of “replication” or it’s not actually natural selection.   But replication is not needed if you start with an infinity of heterogeneous universes.  In other words replication is simulated via the anthropic lens over the life-supporting subset of all possible universes.

Many are troubled by dark energy. I will tell you first why dark energy is really crazy. Then I tell you that the crazy part is not actually the problem of dark energy, but one of basic general relativity. Many educated people are proudly critical of dark stuff, but when it comes to relativity, they do not want to be found hanging out in the crack-pot corner. In other words, my post is directed at the guys who go: “I know about relativity and agree it is more or less fine what those cosmologists did then, but this dark stuff now is going too far! Stop the wild guessing and go back to doing proper science.”

Proteins are the indispensable catalytic workhorses, carrying out the processes essential to life in today's sophisticated organisms, but long ago ribonucleic acid (RNA) reigned supreme.

Researchers have produced an atomic picture that shows how two of these very old molecules interact with each other and it provides a rare glimpse into the transition from an ancient, RNA-based world to our present, protein-catalyst dominated world. 

Want to kill about 8,000 hours of your life?   Go to data.gov and start looking around.  In the interest of transparency (well, sometimes - see Recovery Accountability and Transparency meeting not open to the public), the Obama Administration has posted over 270,000 sets of raw data from its departments, agencies, and offices on the World Wide Web.

Good luck figuring it out, right?  The best place to hide stuff is in plain sight, skeptics will claim.

Nope, some folks at Rensselaer are here to make it simple.

I am 26,160 words into my squid racing novel, about halfway through the plot, and enjoying NaNoWriMo quite thoroughly. But I just had to pop out of my month of hibernation to link a few really cool squid-in-the-news stories. Evidence continues to build that squid are basically awesome:
 
SQUID FLY: We've known for a long time that squid can fly, but a recent review paper summed up all the evidence and made some cool calculations about velocity and body postures.

Plants often get shorted on attention among biologists.  Don't get me wrong -- there is a huge scientific community of plant biologists, field botanists, and agronomists out there, and plenty of research is conducted on plants. 

For the bulk of biologists, though, the most interesting questions are those which relate closely to our own species.  It's hard to resist the draw of learning where we came from or potential medical miracles such as stem cell research.  We can't really learn much about those kinds of things from plants.

Or can we?