This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Moss excitement — “It’s not every day you can watch moss grow!” says a press release from the University of Wollongong (UOW), Australia. Too true. The details in the press release lead to an invitation…. Astronomers and […]
Marcus Byrne tells about the dung-beetles-and-the-Milky-Way research that led to an Ig Nobel Prize for him and his colleagues, in this University of the Witwatersrand video: That Ig Nobel Prize was awarded, in 2013, jointly in the fields of biology and astronomy, to Marie Dacke [SWEDEN, AUSTRALIA], Emily Baird [SWEDEN, AUSTRALIA, GERMANY], Marcus Byrne [SOUTH AFRICA, UK], […]
Edward Schreiber and Orson Anderson once tested whether the Moon really could be made of green cheese. Caltech planetary scientist David Stephenson discussed that achievement, in Box 1 of his article in Physics Today in November 2014. In their 1970 article in the journal Science, Schreiber and Anderson compared the speeds of sound waves in rocks that were […]
How many universes are necessary for an ice cream to melt? Asks Professor Milan M. Ćirković [pictured] of the Astronomical Observatory Belgrade, Serbia, in the Serbian Astronomical Journal, Vol. 166, page 55-59. His paper considers the possibilities of other universes where a soft ice cream, left to its own devices, might be generally more likely […]
“Rogue Microwave Ovens Are the Culprits Behind Mysterious Radio Signals” is the headline on Nadia Drake’s article in the Phenomena blog. Drake writes: if you happen to be reheating your coffee at the Parkes Observatory in Australia, you could be contributing to the growing collection of mysterious radio signals known as perytons. Well, the collection […]
Stochastic flights of propellers, seldom discussed until now, are openly described in this new study: “Stochastic flights of propellers,” Margaret Pan [pictured here] (UC Berkeley), Hanno Rein (IAS), Eugene Chiang (UC Berkeley), Steven N. Evans (UC Berkeley), arXiv:1206.3583v1, June 15, 2012. The authors report: “Kilometer-sized moonlets in Saturn’s A ring create S-shaped wakes called ‘propellers’ in […]
Today, December 22, 2011, is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Grote Reber [pictured here, as he was around 1937], who is credited with building the first big dish radio telescope. Bill Higgins writes: It has been 100 years since the birth of Grote Reber on 22 December 1911. He died nine years ago, but his […]
Once upon a time the universe may have seemed a tidy place. (Time may have seemed tidier, too. But that’s a different aspect of the story, to be discusses another, uh, time.) Now the universe seems a glorious mess. Here’s a new book, perfect for anyone who wants to give certain of the Messier parts […]
The strange story (stranger still as told here, machine-translated into English by the Chrome browser) of a strange man with a strangely strong desire to see an asteroid, reported (in French) in Est Republicain: He Wanted to See The Asteroid: A Madman Stuck on a Chimney A madman who wanted to see the passage of […]
University of Tel Aviv astronomer Alon Retter alerts us to his provocative paper positing a mathematical similarity between astronomical objects and human children. Retter’s monography is another example of the spectacular nature of many research papers in the small, new viXra depository (profiled here recently; see “Alternate everything: the joy of viXra“) as compared to […]