Freeman Dyson is a global warming skeptic. This should not come as a surprise. Last Sunday, the New York Times Magazine featured a profile of the physicist, now in his 80s, as its cover story. He’s been ensconced at the Institute for Advanced Study for the last several decades. I liked the piece. There are [...]
Geoff Marcy is a Berkeley professor of astronomy and, in little more than a decade, his research team has discovered about half of the known planets outside of our solar system. I sat in with him one night this fall as he used the Keck telescope to scan nearby stars for planets. The result is [...]
This was fun to report. A short article, called “Lucky Star,” is out in the new California magazine about astronomer Maryam Modjaz and her work documenting a supernova. The twist was that, through a bit of good luck, she and her colleagues had telescopes pointed at it the whole time–before it even exploded. In the [...]
This summer I interviewed Kristie Boering, a professor of atmospheric chemistry at UC Berkeley. We talked about the potential environmental side effects of moving to a hydrogen economy. Our discussion, boiled down to about 800 words, is in the current issue of California magazine. Boering is incredibly articulate, and I learned a lot in the [...]
This morning, NASA and the Exploratorium webcast live from Xinjiang, China. You can watch their hour-long production at the Exploratorium’s Total Solar Eclipse web site. (That’s a photo from the Exploratorium blog above.) The broadcast starts about 30 minutes before totality, when the moon completely blocks out the sun. The first fifteen minutes include a [...]
Would be nice to have a little color around here. You’ll learn something, too. Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo. Posting will be slow, er, slower, until the home internet thing is straightened out.
Here is an amazing feat of engineering.The vehicles and robots from Star Wars were always fun to watch, but seemed less feasible, because they had articulated legs and moved like animals. Wheels seem much more efficient and, frankly, easier. But look at this:Notice how that guy nonchalantly kicks BigDog about 35 seconds in? It’s just [...]
The Post is running an article in the A section about divining the origins of the domestic cat. They come from the Fertile Crescent, their domestication coincides with the rise of agriculture, and they can be divided into four geo-genetic groups: Europe, Mediterranean, East Africa, Asia. (Why not West Africa? How did they get specific [...]
The amazing, disappearing honeybee has become the sleeper hit of journalism. It has slowly gained momentum over the last nine or ten months and now it seems like just about everyone has heard of it, even if they don’t really know anything about it. Most coverage follows the same beaten path: bees are disappearing, did [...]
It is that rare thing to see a new post on this blog. But there’s all this blogging going on at Wired, where I’m hanging out for the summer, and that’s spurred me to get back into it. Keep an eye out, though; this blog might be moving. But first, some news. Mr. Wizard died [...]
On Monday, as I was about to go out to lunch, I peered through my window to see if it was raining (it has rained every day for the last two weeks, it seems). I mentioned to a colleague that it doesn’t look like it will rain. “No,” interjected someone walking by, “but it’s cold [...]
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