On June 8, 1967, Israel attacked the USS Liberty, killing 34 American citizens. Was it a tragic error or was it coldblooded attack on an ally?

The National Security Agency has recently released redacted transcripts and recordings of intercepted Israeli communications just after the attack. Fascinating reading, but will it clear up the controversy?
posted to MetaFilter by ptermit at 12:59 PM on July 17, 2003 (12 comments)

The bird flu is back. Despite denials by the Hong Kong government, the World Health Organization announced yesterday that two people were killed by the same virulent species-jumpingstrain of influenza that caused the 1997 panic. It's certainly less gruesome than the ebola outbreak going on in Congo right now, but, unlike ebola, the flu is highly contagious. [more inside]
posted to MetaFilter by ptermit at 1:05 PM on February 20, 2003 (14 comments)

BAM! The Microwave Anisotropy Probe's long-awaited map of the afterglow of the big bang was released today, and all of a sudden, most of the uncertainty in the concordance model of cosmology has disappeared. We now know, to within 1%, that the universe is 13.7 billion years old. We now know that Hubble constant is 71, plus or minus 4. And though the results agreed stunningly well with the weird picture that cosmologists have about the nature of the cosmos, there was one surprise -- the first stars were born way before expected. Great day for science, and a likely future Nobel.
posted to MetaFilter by ptermit at 4:30 PM on February 11, 2003 (25 comments)

What's the real story here? "An international team researching particle physics at Tohoku University has observed a new kind of neutrino." BZZT! Try again."Sun is ok, says latest neutrino experiment." BZZT. Wrong answer. The media sure made a hash out of this one. [more inside]
posted to MetaFilter by ptermit at 12:33 PM on December 9, 2002 (17 comments)

149 ways to leave your lover: Hell Hath No Fury is a collection of women's breakup letters. (A few excerpts here.) Great premise for a book, but good breakup letters are very rare. Rather than embarrass yourself when dumping your not-so-significant-other, perhaps you should just fork over $149 and have a reverse-Cyrano write one for you.
posted to MetaFilter by ptermit at 9:59 AM on November 13, 2002 (10 comments)

Remember the Sokal Hoax? In the mid 1990s, NYU professor Alan Sokal got a deliberately ridiculous paper in the po-mo journal Social Text, which would have embarrassed the editors if the concept of shame weren't merely a social construct. Now it seems that turnabout is fair play. In this week's Chronicle of Higher Education, there's a fascinating article about two brothers -- they apparently got their physics PhDs by spouting nonsense, and even got their tripe published in peer-reviewed journals. (The article itself requires a subscription, but here is an account by one of the players in the drama. Even though every scientific field has bad journals and these papers are in French, which consigned them to less well-known journals, it's still a major embarrassment for physics.
posted to MetaFilter by ptermit at 7:23 AM on November 5, 2002 (40 comments)

Fire up that warp drive. In this week's issue of Nature, physicists claim to have made 50,000 atoms of antihydrogen. Not only is this a lot more antihydrogen than has been produced before, the stuff is cold -- read slow-moving -- so it's possible that physicists will finally be able to trap it and study it. (Less technical news story here.)
posted to MetaFilter by ptermit at 1:56 PM on September 18, 2002 (26 comments)