I grew up on a small farm and among other creatures, we raised chickens. Every day they had to be fed and watered and their eggs, warm from their bodies, had to be gathered. When the chickens got old enough to stop laying regularly, we’d turn them into stew: we’d kill them and dress them, […]
LWON
Charles Hard Townes died a week ago, aged 99. He was a physicist at Berkeley who came up with the principle of the laser; at age 98, he’d stopped coming into the office every day. His obituaries are thorough and their praise is justified. I’d met him for reasons the obituaries don’t mention. He helped […]
Q: Oh, you’re a doctor! Oh good! I need a doctor. I had the flu shot but I’ve got the flu anyway. I feel like roadkill looks. A: You do know, don’t you, that since this year’s flu shot is only 23% effective, you had an 89% chance of getting the flu. Q: Is that […]
I’ve just finished a story about gas and galaxies. You’re bored already, aren’t you. After I’d sent the editor a query about it, he took months to respond and then wanted several rewrites of the query; I think he was bored too. If gas and galaxies are so boring, why did I want so much […]
Last week, Lockheed announced it had a small team working on what it calls a Compact Fusion Reactor. Fusion is the opposite of fission that’s used in nuclear plants today; it can produce enormous amounts of energy; the fuel for itis cheap and plentiful; a small fusion engine would solve the world’s energy problems. I […]
Richard: A few months ago, Ann wrote a post about beauty and truth in science writing. I object to neither. But she seemed to take exception to a “literary nonfiction” approach to science, and I wondered what in particular her objections were. So I thought I’d ask her. Hey, Ann, what gives? Ann: Literary nonfiction […]
[NOW WITH NEW VISUALIZATION: see below] Planets around other stars, exoplanets, have given me a long-running case of boredom – how long can you sustain OMG LOOKIT THAT PLANET HAS TWO SUNS? not long. I keep writing about them anyway. I do it because 1) sometimes somebody pays me to; and 2) the planets may […]
I was interviewing an astronomer for a story about planets outside our solar system, extrasolar planets. Exoplanets have names like Kepler-11 e, or HD 106906 b, or HAT-P-54b. (Googling those names will get you some satisfyingly weird planets and in fact, most exoplanets are satisfyingly weird. I mean, 51 Peg b is 150 times more […]