News science stories

StrippedScience for letting me borrow his microbe New Year's cartoon! Happy New Year! I was catching up on my blog reader and came across the NatureNews top science stories of 2010. I was curious how many of these stories would have something to do with microbes... turns out quite a few do. Of the 12 science news-worthy events/discoveries selected, 3 were directly related: the claim of Arsenic-based life story, the new HIV drug Truvada (including viruses with microbes), and the synthetic genome from the Ventner institute. In the style of 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon I was curious to see how many of the remaining 9 stories I could connect to microbes, or the microbial world. I was hopeful that I could connect them all in. It is my deeply held belief, after all, that microbes rule the world and play key roles in just about all aspects of our daily life. In the end I think I got all but two (see my stem cell and morality fails below). You will have to tell me if you buy it, or if you … [Read more...] about Top Science Stories of 2010: 6 Degrees of Microbial Separation

One of the very best books I ran across in the process of doing research for Eureka is The Second Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics by Robert P. Crease and Charles C. Mann. It's an extremely detailed treatment of the development of quantum theory, and includes anecdotes that I haven't seen elsewhere. It also does a fantastic job of showing the essential interplay of experiment and theory through the difficult process of developing quantum field theory, which is often underplayed in popular treatments (which tend to be written by theorists, and often treat experiments as a sort of afterthought). Anyway, I got so much good stuff from Crease and Mann that I can't let this series go by without using at least one of the new things I learned from their book for the first time. One of the critical discoveries along the path to QED was what is now known as the "Lamb shift." Its announcement at the famous Shelter Island conference kick-started the work of both … [Read more...] about Advent Calendar of Science Stories 22: Hazing

(When I launched the Advent Calendar of Science Stories series back in December, I had a few things in mind, but wasn't sure I'd get through 24 days. In the end, I had more than enough material, and in fact didn't end up using a few of my original ideas. So I'll do a few additional posts, on an occasional basis, to use up a bit more of the leftover bits from Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist...) Every physicist with the tiniest bit of a public profile gets letters from people with a pet theory to promote. These days, email and social media make it incredibly easy to flood the inbox of any physicist known to the Internet with "exciting" "new" "theories" about... whatever. But this long predates modern telecommunications-- I got my first kook letter by postal mail, in grad school, by virtue of being a co-author on a paper with "quantum" in the title. So it's always been a little amazing to me that two of the great discoveries of modern physics found their way into publication via … [Read more...] about Science Story: Letters to Famous Physicists