As soon as I got over the fainting spell from looking at the Planck satellite’s map – and if you haven’t seen it, look now, faint, and then click – showing the Milky Way, I had a burning question. Okay, true, the Planck satellite wasn’t intended to map the Milky Way. It was supposed to […]
Ann
I’m aging. I love too many people whose health and wellbeing is too uncertain. I want to write about too many things, each one requiring too much time and too many brains. I take on too many assignments and some of the most important are outside my talents and over my head. I can’t keep […]
A charming website called Who’s the Scientist? shows seventh graders’ images of scientists before and after actually meeting scientists.
Crop circles have moved well past circles. Now they’re jellyfish, dragonflies, and trilobites, drawn using higher math, computers, laser pointers, and GPS’s. A lovely little essay by a physicist in a recent Nature calls them “modern mathematical artworks” and hopes that this summer will produce a “bumper batch.” They seem to have no larger meaning, […]
The word, “data” – tables of numbers, incomprehensible graphs — for most of us would make a good sleep aid. For astronomers, though, “data” means a star-sized thing that outshines a galaxy, or a galaxy just being born, or a star that spins in milliseconds. Data for astronomers is a way to survive, a reason […]
Cosmology did it to me again. First it started out by saying that the universe is expanding, but all its mutual gravity pulls against the expansion so the universe is actually slowing down and might just end by being pulled into a cosmic black hole. I thought this sounded a little extreme but it made […]
The last time I wrote about the evolution of language, scientists’ theories sounded like contradictory Just-So stories. Some said language began with gestures, like pointing at the food you want. Others said language began with talking, like “look out!” or “hey you, get over here.” Nobody had much solid evidence: language evolved, after all, without […]
In 2007, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey had just filled a public database with a gazillion galaxies and Kevin Schawinski, a graduate student, needed a sample of the ones called, for their shape, ellipticals. Identifying shape isn’t something computers are much good at, so Kevin looked for his ellipticals, culling out the spirals and irregulars, […]
