Kinship with the cosmos

Are you in the mood for something truly inspiring, exciting and, um, spiritual? If not, why, you really ought to be! If yes, watch this short video of a speech by Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Awesome!

Mechanics of superheroes

The spider-’silk’ produced by Spiderman about as thick as his arm — it’s more like ’spider-rope’. But, does it really need to be that thick? No, says this SciAm article on the wonderful combination of mechanical properties of real spidersilk.
The different silks have unique physical properties such as strength, toughness and elasticity, but all are [...]

Woody Allen does deep physics

Via an e-mail from Anant, we get this wonderful gem published in the New Yorker in 2003.

… I approached Miss Kelly’s gravitational field and could feel my strings vibrating. All I knew was that I wanted to wrap my weak-gauge bosons around her gluons, slip through a wormhole, and do some quantum tunnelling. It was [...]

Intellectual commons

In an interesting piece in Chronicle Review, Mark Oppenheimer urges graduate students (and professors too!) to be interested in (and better yet, contribute to) the broader intellectual discussions and debates (in such magazines as NYRB and NYTimes Book Review, Dissent, etc):

The work of public intellectuals is important to young scholars partly because it helps us [...]

Evolutionary relevance of music

Aapparently, humans are hard-wired to enjoy music. What is the evidence?

Researchers at the Montreal Neurological Institute, for example, have scanned musicians’ brains and found that the “chills” that they feel when they hear stirring passages of music result from activity in the same parts of the brain stimulated by food and sex.

If something happens, scientists [...]

Different meanings of the word ‘replicate’

In the rough-and-tumble world of science, disputes are usually settled in time, as a convergence of evidence accumulates in favor of one hypothesis over another. Until now.

On April 10 economist John R. Lott, Jr., formerly of the American Enterprise Institute, filed a defamation lawsuit against economist Steven D. Levitt of the University of Chicago and [...]

What is so great about the proof of the Poincaré conjecture?

Jordan Ellenberg has a truly wonderful article in Slate.

The entities we study in science fall into two categories: those which can be classified in a way a human can understand, and those which are unclassifiably wild. Numbers are in the first class—you would agree that although you cannot list all the whole numbers, you have [...]

The expert mind

In the latest issue of Scientific American, Philip E. Ross presents an overview of what we know about the Expert Mind, culled from decades of research on chess (which he calls the Drosophila of cognitive science). Here are some of the key conclusions:

The better players did not examine more possibilities, only better ones…

… [T]he expert [...]

Nikola Tesla

Couturnix has a great post — no, make that an absolutely great post — on Nikola Tesla in celebration of the latter’s 150th birthday on July 10. You’ve got to check out that post to see why I’m amazed …

Still, at least the first two commenters on that post were left rather underwhelmed by Couturnix’s [...]

Diet Coke fountains

Why do Mentos and Diet Coke produce such a wonderful effect? The short answer is surface tension and nucleation. For a long answer, go read David Biello’s post over at the SciAm Observations.

Nature’s list of top 50 science blogs

Nature has published a list of the top 50 science blogs by academics; the ranking is based on Technorati ratings. It also has reactions from the bloggers behind the top five blogs.

The top 50 list features quite a few that I read regularly: Pharyngula (1), Cosmic Variance (4), Adventures in Science and Ethics (10), Uncertain [...]

Sociophysics

After writing this post about economics, physics and econophysics, I was poking around the web, looking for Philip Ball’s articles. Ball is the author of the piece that I linked to in my post, and has written quite enthusiastically about “sociophysics” which seems, to me, to be mostly simulations in which independent entities (particles, [...]

Olivia Judson’s agony aunt column

Just take a look at the first Ask Dr. Tatiana column that appeared in the Economist. And, eventually, a book emerged with the same title. From the Economist review:

Olivia Judson’s funny and blissfully original new book …purports to be sex advice offered to the animal kingdom by a universal agony aunt called Dr Tatiana, and [...]

Science of cuteness

Cute cues are those that indicate extreme youth, vulnerability, harmlessness and need, scientists say, and attending to them closely makes good Darwinian sense. As a species whose youngest members are so pathetically helpless they can’t lift their heads to suckle without adult supervision, human beings must be wired to respond quickly and gamely to any [...]

Sexy scientists?

Science is sexy, but scientists?
Yeah, I know the idea sounds spooky. But there is this uber-elite club, and I know quite a few among my colleagues who would qualify. .

Check out the list of 10 Sexiest Geeks of 2005, compiled by the folks at Wired. Quite a few of the good looking ones in [...]