Blogs about Science

Nima Arkani-Hamed thinks space-time is doomed. That doesn’t mean he thinks it’s about to be destroyed by a supervillain. Rather, Nima, like many physicists, thinks that space and time are just approximations to a deeper …

I explored the collection and picked my top six favorite Cavallini puzzles to share with you! I hope you'll find them as captivating and delightful as I did. Whether you're gifting them or enjoying them …

The "UFO Journey" exacts personal costs. An example: Harvard theoretical astrophysicist and professor and Galileo Project cofounder Avi Loeb, who's enduring intense ridicule from "traditional" scientific circles. Greg Taylor sketches the debate over Loeb's 2023 …

Never toured the inside of the Houses of Parliament before, seeing all the red and green colour coded areas (lords and commons – look at the benches next time you see debates in either place) …

Today I’d like to dig a little deeper into some ideas from Part 2. I’ve been talking about causal loop diagrams. Very roughly speaking, a causal loop diagram is a graph with labeled edges. I …

Open Academic Publication Posted 10/28/2023 I’m currently at a workshop on open practices across disciplines, and one topic of discussion is how to change the academic publishing process to be more accessible to both authors …

The dream of soaring in the sky like a bird has captivated the human mind for ages. Although many failed, some eventually succeeded in achieving that goal. These days we take air transportation for granted, …

by Laura Luebbert and Lior Pachter Background (by LL) Four years ago, during the first year of my PhD at Caltech, I participated in a journal club organized by the lab I was rotating in. …

Atomic nuclei are complex quantum many-body systems. Effective theories have helped provide a better understanding of them. The best-known are the shell model, the (Aage) Bohr-Mottelson theory of non-spherical nuclei, and the liquid drop model. …

There is a classic statistical test known as the Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) test (Wikipedia). This post is about an off-label use of the KS-test that I don’t think people know about (not even Kolmogorov or Smirnov), …

There’s been increasing talk about how blue light from phones and computer screens could be a potential cause of skin damage. Is it worth worrying about, or is it just marketing? This topic is going …

The effect varies for different people. Take a moment and look at this. Some people don’t see anything special: just a blue iris in a red eye. Image: CC-BY Tom Stafford 2022 For me though, …

The rise and fall of our interest in progress?

Lots of interest in gene editing startups but in practice they don't do that well: Few diseases can be corrected through gene editing, hence valuations of such companies, despite FDA approvals, are low. Compare with …

Sabine Hossenfelder’s latest video argues There’s no reason for nature to be pretty (5:00) Working on a theory of everything is a mistake because we don’t understand quantum mechanics (8:00). These are just wrong: nature …

Ten years ago, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe pulled up alongside a dusty, icy lump the size of a mountain. The probe would follow its quarry, a comet called 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, for two years as …

In this series we have been very much concerned with the fact that in all areas of practical mathematics–navigation, cartography, surveying, etc–England lagged well behind continental Europe and was very much playing catch up, during …

Clarivate, the data company for scholarly publications, has decided to continue indexing some content from eLife in Web of Science, after reevaluating the open-access biology journal’s unusual practice of publishing articles without accepting or rejecting …

Recently, some astrophysicists have claimed that black holes are the source of dark energy, a force that speeds up the expansion of our universe. The idea fits well together with observations that seem to show …

Election Day Update: For anyone who’s still undecided (?!?), I can’t beat this from Sam Harris. When I think of Harris winning the presidency this week, it’s like watching a film of a car crash …