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2013-01-23 12:37:14 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 3 +1s)

Public Acceptance of Climate Change Affected by Word Usage
Better science communication could lead to a more informed American public.

"Public acceptance of climate change’s reality may have been influenced by the rate at which words moved from scientific journals into the mainstream, according to anthropologist Michael O’Brien..."

Always fun:
"EDITOR’S NOTE: A portion of O’Brien’s experiment can be repeated using any computer with internet access.
1. Go to http://books.google.com/ngrams
2. Enter terms such as “climate change,” “global warming,” or “anthropogenic” and note how they have changed in usage over the past century."

The paper is available here: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0047966

2012-10-08 01:02:09 (6 comments, 1 reshares, 11 +1s)

How I spent my Canadian Thanksgiving.

2012-08-03 23:19:04 (0 comments, 2 reshares, 7 +1s)

Links to know for Curiosity landing on Sunday

Curiosity will be landing on Mars late Sunday ( ~10:30pm PST). Follow Curiosity on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MarsCuriosity "I'm less than 500,000 miles from Mars & the Red Planet looks about the size as a full moon seen from Earth. 2 days to landing!"

The landing will be shown on NASA TV and streamed live at www.nasa.gov/ntv

There are also several events you can attend, and all locations are shown on this google map: http://bit.ly/NFwMTk

For an awesome 3D in-browser visualization of Curiosity's travel and landing, visit http://eyes.nasa.gov/

Some great in-depth technical update videos can be found on NASAJPL Ustream page: http://www.ustream.tv/nasajpl

Well-produced 7 minutes of terror video, if you haven't seen ityet... more »

2012-08-03 22:26:06 (0 comments, 2 reshares, 4 +1s)

Friday Favourites - the birds and the bees, almost
Three of the most interesting pieces of new science to cross my desk this week.

2012-08-03 22:22:14 (3 comments, 2 reshares, 7 +1s)

"I think that this world would look like a very different place if we had more female developers and coders and engineers and entrepreneurs," said Saujani. "Girls are so passionate about technology...it's simply not the case that they aren't interested and it's not the case that they're not good at it....it's just that there's a perception out there that they're not interested, that they're not as good as the boys and that's exactly what we're changing every single day."

2012-07-30 21:30:58 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

"Ask any astronomer what inflation is, and you’ll hear about the moment when the universe’s primordial fireball expanded like a balloon on steroids, smoothing and flattening its initial wrinkles before it grew into the cosmos seen today.  Now, some physicists are trying to let a little air out of that scenario."

2012-07-29 19:21:09 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

2012-07-24 14:36:46 (2 comments, 1 reshares, 1 +1s)

A distinguished British physicist facing trial in Argentina for alleged cocaine smuggling

Paul Frampton, 68, said he thought that he was to meet Denise Milani, a Czech-born glamour model and former Miss Bikini World in a hotel, and was asked by a man in the lobby to look after a suitcase that he was told belonged to her.  The suitcase contained 2kg of cocaine hidden in its lining. Dr Frampton now believes that a fraudster was posing as 32-year-old Miss Milani in an online chat room.

2012-07-24 11:36:23 (1 comments, 7 reshares, 9 +1s)

"Iran's Nuclear Computer 'Forced to Play AC/DC' by Computer Malware". Huh.

2012-07-24 11:35:52 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 4 +1s)

The biggest thing that Sally Ride's passing makes me think of? 

"Sally Ride wasn’t the first US woman to become an astronaut to me, she was an astronaut, a teacher, a scientist, a writer, and a role model who happened to be a woman.

Sally Ride didn’t teach me that women can be anything they want to, just like men can; Sally Ride helped me to grow up in a world where the notion that you couldn’t be anything you wanted because of who you intrinsically are is absurd."

2012-07-23 23:41:18 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 5 +1s)

2012-07-23 22:04:25 (2 comments, 6 reshares, 12 +1s)

Not holding back any punches.

2012-07-23 19:13:52 (0 comments, 4 reshares, 4 +1s)

2012-07-23 14:09:51 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 6 +1s)

The history of science reveals that major discoveries are not predictable. Naively, one might conclude therefore that it is not possible to artificially cultivate an environment that promotes discoveries. I suggest instead that open research without a programmatic agenda establishes a fertile ground for unexpected breakthroughs. Contrary to current practice, funding agencies should allocate a small fraction of their funds to support research in centers of excellence without programmatic reins tied to specific goals.

2012-07-20 17:27:31 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

2012-07-20 00:16:30 (1 comments, 2 reshares, 5 +1s)

Fine. For those of you who need your Boromir meme to go with the post, here you are. http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2012/07/19/one-does-not-simply-believe-in-dark-energy/

2012-07-19 20:39:00 (0 comments, 4 reshares, 7 +1s)

For those wanting a nice walkthrough of how the Higgs mechanism really does its thing, +John Armstrong has you covered:

Part 1: http://unapologetic.wordpress.com/2012/07/16/the-higgs-mechanism-part-1-lagrangians/
Part 2: http://unapologetic.wordpress.com/2012/07/17/the-higgs-mechanism-part-2-examples-of-lagrangian-field-equations/
Part 3: http://unapologetic.wordpress.com/2012/07/18/the-higgs-mechanism-part-3-gauge-symmetries/
Part 4: http://unapologetic.wordpress.com/2012/07/19/the-higgs-mechanism-part-4-symmetry-breaking/

2012-07-18 11:37:09 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 4 +1s)

Telescopes in Chile, Hawaii, and Arizona reach sharpness two million times finer than human vision

Astronomers connected APEX, in Chile, to the Submillimeter Array (SMA) in Hawaii, USA, and the Submillimeter Telescope (SMT) in Arizona, USA. They were able to make the sharpest direct observation ever, of the centre of a distant galaxy, the bright quasar 3C 279, which contains a supermassive black hole with a mass about one billion times that of the Sun, and is so far from Earth that its light has taken more than 5 billion years to reach us.

The observations were made in radio waves with a wavelength of 1.3 millimetres. This is the first time observations at a wavelength as short as this have been made using such long baselines. The observations achieved a sharpness, or angular resolution, of just 28 microarcseconds — about 8 billionths of a degree. This represents the ability tod... more »

2012-07-18 00:24:21 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 3 +1s)

Any Standford locals have room for an adopted kitten?

2012-07-17 16:05:55 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

2012-07-17 13:19:03 (2 comments, 17 reshares, 13 +1s)

This is surprisingly well done for this genre of video. Everyone likes chemistry musicals, right?

2012-07-16 22:55:48 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

How angiosperms (flowering plants) came to be.  A long form, picture heavy, look at the evolution of angiosperms, from the fern allies to the Ancient Egyptians.

2012-07-13 14:34:36 (2 comments, 8 reshares, 8 +1s)

Really interesting methodology here.

"We program the device to record for 30 seconds every 12 minutes," Mehl said in an interview. "That gives you about 5 soundbites per hour, or 70 soundbites per day."

By "sampling" people's daily lives, Mehl said his recorder often picks up on things that people don't notice. Most of us remember only the highlights of our days — an interesting conversation or a ballgame. But much of the time, our lives run on autopilot, and we don't notice what's going on. Mehl said getting detailed information about what people do during the majority of their time is central to understanding them psychologically.

When male scientists talked to other scientists about their research, it energized them. But it was a different story for women.

"For women, the pattern was just the opposite,s... more »

2012-07-13 13:46:04 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 6 +1s)

"I was imagining something like "Particle Physics Advice: 5 cents", which is a little off. But not by much. In the video above, you can see him in New York, hanging out in front of a wipe board that says "ASK A NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING PHYSICIST!" (Another sign to Lederman's left just has a picture of a model of the atom and an arrow pointing at him.)"

2012-07-13 11:52:12 (1 comments, 4 reshares, 5 +1s)

Sure, why not.

2012-07-12 20:23:47 (2 comments, 1 reshares, 4 +1s)

Theoretical physicist Filippo Miatto and colleagues from the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK, have found a new method of reliably assessing the information contained in photon pairs used for applications in cryptography and quantum computing. The findings, published in EPJ D, are so robust that they enable access to the information even when the measurements on photon pairs are imperfect.

Pre-print: http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.6449
Abstract: "We derive an analytical form of the Schmidt modes of spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) biphotons in both cartesian and polar coordinates. We show that these correspond to Hermite-Gauss (HG) or Laguerre-Gauss (LG) modes only for a specific value of their width, and we show how such value depends on the experimental parameters. The Schmidt modes that we explicitly derive allow one to set up an optimised projection basis that... more »

2012-07-12 11:40:32 (0 comments, 2 reshares, 6 +1s)

A team of astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has discovered a fifth moon orbiting the icy dwarf planet Pluto.

The Pluto team is intrigued that such a small planet can have such a complex collection of satellites. The new discovery provides additional clues for unraveling how the Pluto system formed and evolved. The favoured theory is that all the moons are relics of a collision between Pluto and another large Kuiper belt [1] object billions of years ago.

2012-07-12 02:43:42 (6 comments, 4 reshares, 20 +1s)

The entirety of what I accomplished today.

2012-07-12 02:08:23 (3 comments, 2 reshares, 10 +1s)

Hosted a little birthday party for a friend today.

The menu:
Salmon and pickle onigiri
Mini peppers with old cheddar and sundried tomatoes
Mango-pork BBQ skewers
Strawberry 'butterfly' cupcakes
Watermelon shark fruit salad

I don't have [human] kids, so I have to make food that looks like this for my adult friends...

2012-07-10 20:37:15 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

Did reionization halt star formation 13 billion years ago, leaving behind small, 'star-starved' galaxies? Is this the answer to the "missing satellite problem"? Quite possibly.

2012-07-10 20:30:28 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Today in Ottawa, scientists invoking an image of the Grim Reaper will take on the Stephen Harper government for what they call the "death of evidence" brought about by federal cuts to everything from the long-form census to closure of the Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory in Nunavut.

The federal government's omnibus budget bill includes a plan to overhaul environmental protections, affecting several pieces of legislation. The budget bill repeals the Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act, overhauls the Fisheries Act and gives the federal cabinet the final say in approving industrial projects that significantly impact the environment. Here, a wild caribou roams the tundra near the Meadowbank Gold Mine in Nunavut.

2012-07-10 19:53:58 (0 comments, 3 reshares, 1 +1s)

Italian scientists are up in arms over proposed budget cuts at over a dozen national research institutes as part of a spending review announced on 6 July that will strike €26 billion from the national government's budget. Among the hardest-hit is the flagship National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN)

2012-07-09 20:02:54 (0 comments, 4 reshares, 5 +1s)

The footnotes are the funniest part.

2012-07-09 13:52:57 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 1 +1s)

The CSIRO radio telescope has identified the first known "middleweight" black hole, HLX-1.

2012-07-09 11:18:04 (5 comments, 4 reshares, 5 +1s)

No gender differences emerged for mathematics performance but levels of Math Anxiety (MA) and Test Anxiety (TA) were higher for girls than for boys. Girls and boys showed a positive correlation between MA and TA and a negative correlation between MA and mathematics performance. TA was also negatively correlated with mathematics performance, but this relationship was stronger for girls than for boys. When controlling for TA, the negative correlation between MA and performance remained for girls only. Regression analyses revealed that MA was a significant predictor of performance for girls but not for boys.
http://www.behavioralandbrainfunctions.com/content/8/1/33/abstract

2012-07-09 10:54:02 (4 comments, 2 reshares, 4 +1s)

Absolutely ridiculous.

Adbus Salam, who died in 1996, was once hailed as a national hero for his pioneering work in physics and his contribution to Pakistan's nuclear programme. Now his name is stricken from school textbooks because he was a member of the Ahmadi sect that has been persecuted by the government and targeted by Taliban militants, who view them as heretics.