http://sciencewriter.org Davide Castelvecchi, Freelance Science Writer: Physics, Astronomy, and Math Mon, 29 Apr 2013 19:31:50 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en [The following is my review of The Infinity Puzzle: Quantum Field Theory and the Hunt for an Orderly Universe, by Frank Close. It appeared in the July 2012 issue of Physics World.] Since it opened for business a couple of years back, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been confirming the ... http://sciencewriter.org/2012/07/who-would-get-a-nobel-for-the-higgs-boson/ Speeding toward interstellar space, NASA's twin Voyager probes have now truly peered outside the solar system—and they've seen something no human has glimpsed before. According to a new study, the two spacecraft have detected a type of ultraviolet light from other regions of our Milky Way galaxy that had previously been ... http://sciencewriter.org/2011/12/voyager-probes-see-what-no-man-has-seen-before/ My two latest posts at Degrees of Freedom describe how the universe acts as a giant magnifying lens, so that very distant galaxies appear larger in the sky than closer ones, in a reversal of the usual laws of perspective. The Cosmic Magnifying Lens describes the phenomenon (check out the videos!), ... http://sciencewriter.org/2011/12/faster-than-light-galaxies-and-the-cosmic-magnifying-lens/ Mariastella Gelmini, Italy's Minister of Education, University and Research, made an embarassing statement about the annoucement made last month by physicists on the OPERA collaboration, in which she said that Italy had contributed to the construction of a tunnel between CERN and the national underground laboratories called Laboratori Nazionali del ... http://sciencewriter.org/2011/10/what-the-italian-minister-of-education-university-and-research-said/ Emi Kasai/Scientific American Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games column was often the cover story. Those were the days. I started a new math and physics blog called Degrees of Freedom as part of ScientificAmerican.com's new blog network, managed by Bora Zivcovic. In the introductory post I talk about how I envision the blog and ... http://sciencewriter.org/2011/07/introducing-degrees-of-freedom/ Google and other search engines are killing the ancient art of witty headline writing. Or are they? Much has been tweeted about a blog post that appeared on the web site of the Atlantic the other day. In it, the writer lamented that online media, with their obsession for attracting traffic ... http://sciencewriter.org/2011/05/google-kills-witty-headlines/ ASME Tonight the American Society of Magazine Editors gave Scientific American the 2011 award for general excellence in the category of finance, technology and lifestyle magazines (a hodgepodge of science magazines as well as men’s magazines and business and "active-interest" publications). The other nominees were Backpacker, Bloomberg Markets, GQ and Popular ... http://sciencewriter.org/2011/05/scientific-american-gets-national-magazine-award/ "Charles Sanders Peirce once observed that in no other branch of mathematics is it so easy for experts to blunder as in probability theory." Thus began an article in the October 1959 Scientific American by the celebrated math columnist Martin Gardner. In fact, as John Allen Paulos observed ... http://sciencewriter.org/2011/04/revisiting-the-monty-hall-problem/ On April 8, 1911, at the Leiden Cryogenic Laboratory in the Netherlands, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes and his collaborators immersed a mercury capillary in liquid helium and saw the mercury's electrical resistance drop to nothing once the temperature reached about 3 kelvins, or 3 degrees above absolute zero (around –270 Celsius). A ... http://sciencewriter.org/2011/04/superconductors-100/ ASME The American Society of Magazine Editors announced the finalists for the National Magazine Awards yesterday. These awards are also called "Ellies" because the winners receive a reproduction of Calder's sculpture "Elephant." Scientific American got two nominations: one for "General Excellence" in the category of Finance, Technology and Lifestyle Magazines (apparently there ... http://sciencewriter.org/2011/04/2011-ellies/