Thursday Baby Blogging 043009

“These Baby Blogging pictures are old hat,” says SteelyKid. “I could do this standing on my head!” You can’t really tell from the angle, but she’s laughing. This is a game we play from time to time– I’ll tip her over backwards, gently lower her down to the floor, and say “BONK!” Then I pick […]

Dorky Poll: Favorite Wavelength

I have two labs today, and a lunch meeting, so no time for detailed blogging about science. It’s been a while since I did a Dorky Poll, though, so here’s one to keep people entertained while I’m working: What’s your favorite color? “What’s dorky about that?” you ask. You need to give your answer in […]

links for 2009-04-30

Confessions of a Community College Dean: The Boy, On Scientists "My hero is a scientist. Every day they mak EXITING discoveries. They also make AWESOME potions, space probes and cool new ships. They launch rockets and space ships. I like it when the Space Shuttle goes up. It always makes me think of the scientists […]

Email from Andrei Derevianko

I got email this afternoon from Andrei Derevianko, the leader of the research project badly described by the press release mentioned in the previous post. He sounds a little surprised by the whole thing (though not much more surprised than I am that my griping on the Internet got brought to anybody’s attention), and explains […]

The LHC Gets Credit for Atomic Theory

A wonderfully incoherent press release came across my EurekAlert feeds yesterday, with the headline “Particle physics study finds new data for extra Z-bosons and potential fifth force of nature.” You can tell it’s going to make no sense at all from the very first sentence: The Large Hadron Collider is an enormous particle accelerator whose […]

links for 2009-04-29

Gallery: Flickr users make accidental maps – tech – 27 April 2009 – New Scientist "Billions of photos have now been uploaded to the internet, and many are tagged with text descriptions. Some are even geotagged – stamped with the latitude and longitude coordinates at which the image was taken. David Crandall and colleagues at […]

Show Me the Pony

So, the President gave some sort of speech to a bunch of smart people yesterday (video, transcript), and hearts are a-flutter all over the science blogosphere, as President Obama promises great things for science: We double the budget of key agencies, including the National Science Foundation, a primary source of funding for academic research, and […]

Dead Dinosaurs and Denialism

Yesterday, EurekAlert served up a press release titled New blow for dinosaur-killing asteroid theory, reporting on Gerta Keller of Princeton, who says that the Chicxulub crater isn’t really from the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs. Keller thinks the crater had nothing to do with the extinction event, and claims to have found evidence that […]