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A Few Powers of Ten | Cosmic Variance
Via the endlessly enjoyable It’s Okay to Be Smart, here’s a gif image that zooms in by about three orders of magnitude. (Not sure of the original source.) We start by looking at an amphipod, a tiny shrimplike critter about a millimeter across....
Gravitational Waves in Five Years | Cosmic Variance
LIGO, the gravitational-wave observatory, is currently on ice. After running successfully (although without actually detecting any gravitational waves) through 2007, it got a mini-upgrade and ran as Enhanced LIGO in 2009 and 2010. But in October 2010...
How the Wet-Dog Shake Gets Mammals Dry in No Time Flat | 80beats
There’s a certain expression a wet dog wears as it trots up to you, a kind of gleam in the eye that says, “I’m about to shake so vigorously that in a mere 4 seconds, 70 percent of the water in my fur will fly off of my coat and on to you.” But...
Move Over, Lasers: Masers Now Work at Room Temperature | 80beats
The core of the new room-temperature maser When the laser was first invented, it was “a solution waiting for a problem,” a piece of cutting-edge technology with no applications. Today, found in everything from sensors to communications to surgery,...
Blame Climate Change for Increasingly Extreme Summers, Says Leading Climatologist | 80beats
Even ignoring the wildfires and drought this season, the sweltering heat itself is proclaiming this an intense summer. And unusually hot summers are becoming not so unusual, according to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers...
Blame Climate Change for Increasingly Extreme Summers, Says Leading Climatologist | 80beats
Even ignoring the wildfires and drought this season, the sweltering heat itself is proclaiming this an intense summer. And unusually hot summers are becoming not so unusual, according to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers...
Mars Science Laboratory Touches Down Tonight | Cosmic Variance
Nowadays everyone calls it the “Curiosity rover,” but I got to know it as the Mars Science Laboratory, and I’m too old and set in my ways to switch. Launched on November 26, 2011, the mission is scheduled to land on Mars’s Gale...
Higgs Papers Out | Cosmic Variance
We were all transfixed by the Higgs seminars on July 4, but the work was nowhere near over for the experimentalists — they had to actually write up papers describing the results. And of course taking the opportunity to do a little more analysis...
Physicists Build the Best Sandcastles | Discoblog
Attention, beach-going children: science has something to say to you. You know that towering castle of bucket-ramparts and seashell turrets you built last week with your dad? Can’t touch this. In a very poorly copy-edited but technically interesting...
