About 18 months ago, in late January 2009, during the tempestuous cyclone Klaus in France, which killed 26 people and wreaked enormous damage to the nearby once ancient region of Aquitaine, a new…

A new type of operator is required. Why? Because unitary transformations cannot move subspaces of a Hilbert space. They cannot move their own eigenvectors. Since their eigenfunctions span the whole…

As a first post (ever) I would like to write a little about Santorini, the volcano I plan to spend the next three years studying.  It may be a little self-indulgent, but I hope you'll find this…

You must be quite familiar with what happens when you toss a pebble into a pond. You might describe the simple event as a massive rotating object splashing into a deformable fluid. Or, you might… not…

Propaganda - An Application Of The Forgetting Curve Learning curves,  forgetting curves, adjacency and the scientific roots of the black art of propaganda. Modern rules of propaganda have their…

Zombies - A Public Policy StudyFound last night during a Google search for latest news about something entirely unrelated to this search result: Night of the Living WonksToward an international…

The responsibility of Twitter updates got you down? D'you think about tweeting but never actually get around to it? Never fear, Adam Wilson is here. The University of Wisconsin-Madison biomedical…

Sexual images trigger chemical reactions in your brain, which in turn compel us to act in specific ways, or be drawn to certain things, or motivated to engage in particular behaviors. It's common…

Yesterday, I seemed to be under a giant cloud, with lots up in the air. A difficult ghostwriting deadline for an article about clouds loomed, but the Tortoise Cat signaled we were overdue for a…

How did the first stars and galaxies form? Are there other planets like Earth? What is the universe made of? These are the fundamental questions that astronomers hope to answer in the next decade…

How did the first stars and galaxies form? Are there other planets like Earth? What is the universe made of? These are the fundamental questions that astronomers hope to answer in the decade with a…

This week a computer science researcher named Vinay Deolalikar claimed to have a proof that P is not equal to NP. Let’s set aside what this means for another day, lest I get distracted.  The…

I almost categorized this under Humor but it's more scary than funny... TPM highlights the Conservapedia argument against the theory of relativity: "The theory of relativity is a mathematical system…

Tom Scott is a geek comedian who has been described as a "sometime internet funny man" by The Register has come to the rescue of science journalism with a list of warnings they can go ahead and…

Over at the NASW.org archives, their cybrarian did a summary of science blog sites.  And in case "Science2.0" isn't hot enough, we find science3point0.com (yes, that's their moniker): Another…

Ever been stuck in an airport? A foreign country? Try being stuck in orbit! Poor Air Force Major Abacha Tunde plus a colleague were trapped on a Soyuz in orbit for over 14 years. Fortunately, thanks…

The second of six parts of my presentation at Inconjunction 2010. I resented on Archaeology and PseudoArchaeology. It was my first live talk, so I was really serious, but the audience was great and I…

The last 10 years or so I have been working on various aspects of the environment. Though my main perspective has been scientific, the political framework set the scene and define the premises for…

Cecilia van der Merwe, South African engineer and brains behind my World Cup Physics of the Vuvuzela article, was on "Let's Talk Geek" and gave us a mention - so in return you have to devote 2 hours…

Idle computers are the astronomers' playground: Three citizen scientists--an American couple and a German--have discovered a new radio pulsar hidden in data gathered by the Arecibo Observatory. This…