I grew up in Sacramento, and I read an inscription in the State Capitol Building that I subliminally internalized, “Bring me men to match my mountains.” I was born in Nevada which is the most mountainous state in the lower 48 states, measured in the number of mountain chains. My mother was born in Reno, [...]

While a new ballot initiative that was the subject of my February 14, 2010 post poses a challenge to California’s movement to alternative fuels, a smaller state in the mid-Pacific is making great strides toward that goal with its own program. On a trip to the Big Island in November I made a visit to [...]

In previous posts I have made it clear that I believe global warming is a reality that must be confronted. But this has been a difficult week for those who share my view. On February 11 there was snow on the ground someplace in all of the 50 states except Hawaii, and a group constructed [...]

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 [...]

Tags: Medecine, Rebecca Skloot

In June I did a post on the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Livermore National Laboratory where scientists have built the world’s most powerful laser. The laser is in a building the size of three football fields and ten stories high. Inside the building the Livermore scientists have used hundreds of optical amplifiers, beam [...]

Tags: Ignition Fusion

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 [...]

Tags: Entropy, Sean Carroll