Climate change is a polarizing science policy debate the likes of which humankind has never witnessed before. Even President Obama's science advisor John Holdren never dreamed up this kind of doomsday scenario when he was writing books with the king of doomsday predictions, Paul Ehrlich. Women in the workforce, CFCs, acid rain, islands of garbage - nothing from past cultural debates compares to the scariness of rolling drought and melting glaciers. What to do? On one side we have people who insist a world where elites have energy and others do not must be implemented right now.
The notion of gun-propelled launch goes back to Jules Verne. Such Mass Drivers have been envisioned in numerous Sci Fi tales, including "Earthlight", by Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" and "Heart of the Comet" by Benford&Brin. We've also seen them portrayed in Buck Rogers, Babylon 5 and Halo.
I just saw the most annoying video about an interesting physics question. Apart from the over the top stereotypical German (supposed to be funny or is he for real?) and arrogant “look how clever we physicists are” attitude, the most annoying is that the really interesting stuff about the question isn’t even mentioned. Arrrggg - how can one be so ignorant?
Supersonic passenger jets are so 1970s. The Concorde has been gone for almost 10 years and most people don't miss it. But its fundamental concept - people want to get places faster - has not gone away.
Now an MIT researcher says he has come up with a concept that may solve many of the problems that grounded the Concorde, like expensive tickets, high fuel costs, limited seating and noise disruption from the jet’s sonic boom. Qiqi Wang, an assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics, says the solution, in principle, is simple, going back to the earliest days of flight: Instead of flying with one wing to a side, why not two?
A new imaging system uses walls, doors or floors as 'mirrors' to gather information about scenes that it can't see, even though those objects are not reflective.
Yes, it could ultimately lead to imaging systems that allow emergency responders to evaluate dangerous environments or vehicle navigation systems that can negotiate blind turns, among other applications, but spying on people sounds like more fun.
Time is relative, of course, but we still hate to be late for appointments. So there has always been research on making our keeping of time a little more accurate.
A new clock tied to the orbiting of a neutron around an atomic nucleus could have such unprecedented accuracy that it neither gains nor loses 1/20th of a second in 14 billion years - basically, you wouldn't have needed to reset your watch yet even if you had been around at the beginning of the Universe.
Whenever I try to explain something about particle physics to a layman, I run into the problem of mass/energy units. A Giga-electronVolt is not something you may expect people to be familiar with, and on the other hand it is not appealing to explain directly how it is defined: "if you take an electron and accelerate it by passing it through a potential difference of one billion Volts, that's the energy it has at the end: one GeV": this distracts the listeners by forcing them to focus on electrostatics, with the potential outcome that the conversation may diverge due to additional questions, like "Does the electric field need be uniform ?" or even, "What is a potential difference ?".
The idea for this blog was dead simple. In my second blog at Science 2.0, "Quaternions for a Third Grader", I showed of my clay and pipe cleaner model of quaternion multiplication. A few months ago, David Halliday and I started talking about the finite group Q8, which over the real numbers becomes the quaternions. David pointed out my tetrahedron was half the cube it needed to be to represent Q8. That was the idea for the blog: make a cube to represent that finite group.
A study by Indiana University researchers on "coregasm" says it has confirmed anecdotal evidence that exercise can lead to female orgasms.
Good news for health clubs everywhere? Maybe. But it's been darn hard to pin down reliable data on it. It makes the media rounds -
and of course, this site - every few years.
