This idea dates back to the Russians in the 1970s. The surface of Venus is far too hot, and the atmosphere too dense, for Earth life. However, our air is a lifting gas on Venus, with about half the…

The 14 year old kid in the picture on the right was named Aitzaz Hasan Bangash. His name is a difficult one to remember for westerners, but that is a pity, because he ended his life as a true hero.…

The most scientifically interesting objects are not the bright blueish white ones in the center of the image, but the small reddish looking ones off to the sides.  Here's how and why. …

At the 1962 Rochester conference in Geneva, the prediction that a particle later called the Omega minus should exist, already proposed in a paper by Glashow and Sakurai, was not considered important…

This blog is straight old Newtonian gravity. A goal is to understand where the three kinds of masses in Newton's Universal Law of Gravity live in the context of the action. In the force equation,…

Recently a friend of mine got diagnosed with breast cancer.  It was devastating, and she started to go through the usual stages that people do when dealing with tragic news.  My wife told…

Dr. James Hamblin at The Atlantic takes a skeptical look at the recent demonizing of gluten and grain and sugars and renewed calls for something resembling a paleo diet. I have been beating the…

Predictions for 2014: No firm direct detection of dark matter, a better understanding of the Higgs boson, an announcement that Fermilab will live with a muon and neutrino related program, and a…

I been having bad dreams (a little exaggeration) on trying to contemplate if the arguments stated in EPR paper may have been correct. It is not clear to me whether Bell really did disprove the hidden…

http://www.sacbee.com/2012/05/04/4464809/california-cap-and-trade-will.html http://www.sacbee.com/2012/04/29/4449306/cap-and-trade-has-lessons-for… http://www.nypost.com/p/blogs/capitol/carbon_tax…

In the 1970s, during the heyday of progressive social engineering ideas like forced busing, education began to plummet.  President Jimmy Carter's solution to education woes was to create another…

http://www.sciencecodex.com/study_shows_islamist_extremists_emphasize_se... http://www.bellinghamherald.com/2012/07/08/2594625/pakistan-shuns-physi…

http://action.fooddemocracynow.org/sign/stop_the_monsanto_protection_act/http://southeastfarmpress.com/government/ag-appropriations-bill-delayed… The House of Representatives has provided a respite…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2012/dec/21/science-policy-brian-coxhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/science/the-h-word/2012/dec/21/history-science...http://www.newstatesman.com/sci-tech/sci-tech…

In April, a story was promoted by mainstream Scare Journalists that imported rice had high levels of lead - I am linking to Time but it was everywhere.  It was based on a poster at a conference.…

Another year, another card inspired by what I am thinking about in physics. Inside the card it reads... Time is not space, space is not time. Space-time is a marriage, complex and tense. In an…

The XVIth international chess tournament "Citta' di Padova" ended last Sunday with the victory of GM Kiril Georgiev, who got 7 points out of 9 games. The tournament saw the participation of 63…

I met George Zweig at a conference in Crete last Summer. He impressed me with the multidisciplinarity of his interests and his quite entertaining career. He has a degree in mathematics, and did quite…

Some in journalism have gotten tired of hearing about how jobs are being cut because the public doesn't want to read them, and how scientists make fun of them because, really, there are only so many…

As I mentioned in my review of the Chem C3000, it’s sad that science kits usually can’t compete with more mainstream stuff like Guitar Hero. They also tend to be pricey, but the upside is that online…