Late in life, Claude Monet had surgery to remove the lens of his left eye as a remedy for cataracts, and found that as the lens was no longer blocking them,
he could now see ultraviolet light.* When Alek Komarnitsky, engineer and self professed geek,
had the natural lens replaced in one of his eyes due to cataracts, he found that he, too could see UV. Naturally, he decided to test the limits of his newfound ability, and to show others
what it's like to have ultraviolet vision.
(*via Kottke)
posted by ocherdraco
on Apr 17, 2012 -
39 comments
Theory of the Origin, Evolution, and Nature of Life, in which the author, Erik Andrulis, proposes an "axiomatic, experimentally testable, empirically consistent, heuristic, and unified theory of life." He also claims to be able to unify physics.....ahem. All this is done using the chemistry notation you learned in highschool.
[more inside]
posted by AElfwine Evenstar
on Jan 27, 2012 -
53 comments
Professor Brian Cox (previously 1 2) goes unplugged in a specially recorded programme from the lecture theatre of the Royal Institution of Great Britain. In his own inimitable style, Brian takes an audience of famous faces, scientists and members of the public on a journey through some of the most challenging concepts in physics.
[more inside]
posted by lazaruslong
on Jan 14, 2012 -
40 comments
CERN has begun webcasting a public seminar in which there may or may not be some announcement regarding the significance or otherwise of recent observations regarding the possible existence of something that might be the Higgs boson. I am not a nuclear physicist, so I will try and keep up but will mainly be trying to catch the significance of the observations they have collected so far. In case these are talked about in terms of sigmas (there's scuttlebutt going around that this is a 3.5 sigma event),
here's a table of sigma and probability.
[more inside]
posted by carter
on Dec 13, 2011 -
85 comments
One of my favorite
blogs happens to be local to me. Eric Berger, the Houston Chronicle's "SciGuy" usually reports on the
weather. But he also posts entertaining and serious stuff as well.
[more inside]
posted by PapaLobo
on Nov 22, 2011 -
3 comments
Three years ago, a question was posed to two
Internet forums. Could you build a wind powered vehicle that could travel downwind, faster than the wind? The lines were quickly drawn and the battle was on, including
here on the blue. It took nearly two years for the debate to be settled, and on July 2, 2010, what seemed impossible was
achieved. The answer is
yes,
you can.
posted by smoothvirus
on Oct 11, 2011 -
96 comments
TV Fact Checkers "Behind every smart TV show, there is a tireless script coordinator, technical adviser, researcher or producer who makes sure the jargon is right, the science is accurate and the pop culture references are on-point." This week, Wired "is speaking with fact-checkers behind the fall TV season’s geekiest shows."
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Sep 22, 2011 -
72 comments
Old Theories As Limits of New Ones -- Theoretical physicist, Lubos Motl, takes a brief tour through the history of physics, and explains the simple mathematical relationship of old theories to the theories that replace them.
posted by empath
on Aug 5, 2011 -
16 comments
Larry Gonick is a veteran American cartoonist best known for his delightful comic-book guides to science and history, many of which have previews online. Chief among them is his long-running
Cartoon History of the Universe (later
The Cartoon History of the Modern World), a sprawling multi-volume opus documenting everything from the Big Bang to the Bush administration. Published over the course of three decades, it takes a truly global view -- its time-traveling Professor thoroughly explores not only familiar topics like Rome and World War II but the oft-neglected stories of Asia and Africa, blending caricature and myth with careful scholarship (cited by
fun illustrated bibliographies) and tackling even the most obscure events
with intelligence and wit. This savvy satire carried over to Gonick's
Zinn-by-way-of-
Pogo chronicle
The Cartoon History of the United States, along with a bevy of
Cartoon Guides to other topics, including
Genetics, Computer Science, Chemistry, Physics, Statistics, The Environment, and (yes!)
Sex. Gonick has also maintained a few sideprojects, such as
a webcomic look at Chinese invention,
assorted math comics (
previously), the
Muse magazine mainstay
Kokopelli & Co. (featuring the shenanigans of his
"New Muses"), and
more. See also
these lengthy interview snippets, linked
previously. Want more? Amazon links to the complete oeuvre inside!
[more inside]
posted by Rhaomi
on Jun 6, 2011 -
29 comments
"The
Earth tide is a little-known daily event, similar to the oceans' more familiar tides. But the sun and moon's gravity doesn’t just pull on water, it deforms the Earth itself, causing the ground beneath us to bulge toward the pulling heavenly body."
[more inside]
posted by Paragon
on Mar 10, 2011 -
12 comments
Horizon asks
"What is reality?" -- youtube for links for those outside the UK:
1,
2,
3,
4. It's a hard question. To help you answer it, Stanford has a set of free courses available on line by Leonard Susskind:
General Relativity,
Cosmology,
New Revolutions in Particle Physics,
Quantum Entanglement,
Special Relativity,
Classical Mechanics,
Statistical Mechanics,
The Standard Model. (Each link is to lecture 1 of a full college course of a dozen or so lectures.) If you need help with the math,
the Khan Academy should help get you up to speed.
posted by empath
on Jan 23, 2011 -
67 comments
Physicist Erik Verlinde proposed in a recent
paper that the force of gravity can be derived from the principles of thermodynamics.
NY Times explains.
[Physicist Lee] Smolin called it, “very interesting and also very incomplete.”
posted by jjray
on Jul 12, 2010 -
55 comments
Double Full Full Full, annotated (NYT video, reg REq'd) U.S. Olympic Team aerial skier Ryan St. Onge and a science reporter describe via video the physics going on as he executes a triple backflip with four twists.
Also, the
snowboard halfpipe.
(Don't ask me why a triple backflip with four twists is called a "double full full full")
posted by planetkyoto
on Feb 3, 2010 -
16 comments
