Jun 09 2010
The June 2010 edition of Discover Magazinehas an article on Harvard mathematician, Shing-Tung Yau. The article describes Dr. Yau as the man who has devised the math to describe string theory. String theory postulates that at the deepest reality the universe is composed of 10 dimensional vibrating strings. His particular branch of mathematics is topology. [...]
May 05 2010
An article in the April 8, 2010 edition of Nature explores the way in which flocks of birds move together while flying in formation. Scientists mounted 16 gram GPS loggers on the back of homing pigeons in order to track the flight of each bird in a flock of up to ten birds. The experimenters [...]
Apr 10 2010
I just finished watching the first season of the AMC television series Breaking Bad. The series chronicles the life of a high school chemistry teacher Walter White who learns that he has terminal lung cancer and who then turns to the production and sale of methamphetamine to hopefully create an inheritance for his teenage son [...]
Mar 07 2010
I subscribe to Wired Magazine, but am sometimes frustrated by the nature of its content which can drift off into the nonsensical. Just when I am ready to give up on the publication, it prints something that renews my interest. The March 2010 issue has an article by Jordan Ellenberg, a mathematician at the University [...]
Feb 13 2010
I like to quickly leaf through each new weekly edition of Nature when I receive it. In the February 4, 2010 issue a picture of an attractive woman on page 610 and a mid article color picture of human cells caught my eye, so I read the book review by Steve Silberman, who writes for [...]
Feb 07 2010
One of the conceits of the Back to the Future film series was that the protagonist played by Michael J. Fox could use a time machine to return to the past and take actions which would alter the future. This idea is expressed in these lines of doggerel: There once was a young lady named [...]
Jan 29 2010
The Wikipedia says that the Polish geneticist Waclaw Szybalski first used the term “synthetic biology” in 1974. He wrote a comment in the journal Gene in 1978 about the award of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in which he noted “…the new era of synthetic biology where not only existing genes are described [...]
Dec 13 2009
I published the first post to my blog in May. During the relatively short time of my blog’s existence, nothing has created as much controversy as a statement I made in a post in August about a wind farm in Nevada.I noted a statement from the National Wildlife Foundation that said global warming could raise [...]
Jul 25 2009
As the Nineteenth Century drew to a close scientists puzzled over the nature of light. the Scotch scientist, James Clerk Maxwell established that light was an electromagnetic wave that , and waves need a medium in which to propagate. If one tosses a stone into a pond, the water ripples out in waves from the [...]