It’s hard to know whether this glass is half full or half empty: It’s from “The Conceptualization and Measurement of Civic Scientific Literacy for the Twenty-First Century,” Jon Miller’s chapter in the new American Academy of Arts and Science report, “Science and the Educated American: A Core Component of Liberal Education.” (pdf here) Miller has …
I used to write a lot about the Santa Fe Institute and the fascinating trans-disciplinary research that goes on there, but in recent years I sorta lost touch. I went up last week for a visit to reconnect, and, among other things, have tea (sub/ad req): SANTA FE — To understand the Santa Fe Institute, …
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From the New York Times, Sept. 13, 2003: An obituary of the nuclear physicist Edward Teller on Thursday misstated the number of hydrogen atoms that join to make helium in the fusion process. It is four, not two.
When Zach Sharp sent me a copy of his paper in yesterday’s Science Express, I only had to get to the words “moon rocks” to decide to do a story. I mean, they’re moon rocks. Zach, a stable isotope geochemist, is a bit of a mad scientist. So even without moon rocks, his work is …
David Appell, the science journalist whose work more than anyone else’s got me thinking hard about the implications of climate change and its relationship to my journalism, spewed some frustration last week that resonated. It doesn’t quoteblock well, go read the whole thing, but in a nutshell he argues that there’s not much point for …
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update: Eli had a nice post on this topic last week. In the newspaper this week, I took a whack at what I think is one of the fundamental public misunderstandings about the nature of science. I like to call it “the textbook problem”, but one might also characterize it as “the science journalism problem.” …
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From this weekend’s newspaper (sub/ad req), a piece about UNM’s Museum of Southwestern Biology taking responsibility for the remarkable early twentieth century plant collection of Brother Gerfroy Arsène Brouard: A Smithsonian scientist eight decades ago joked that the mosses and lichens of northern New Mexico were sure to suffer before the determined onslaught of Brother …
Some days you have to write about nuclear waste. Some days you have to write about water contamination in the Rio Grande. And some days you simply can’t avoid writing about shooting lasers at the moon (sub/ad req): Scientists using a NASA satellite and a New Mexico telescope have found a missing Soviet spacecraft on …
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If you follow nuclear weapons policy, the last thing you need at this point is another analysis of yesterday’s Nuclear Posture Review rollout. But I did have something to say in this morning’s newspaper (sub/ad req) that represents what I think is an important and underappreciated piece of the debate. Here in New Mexico, home …
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A friend called me out on this morning’s column, a piece about Cathy Plesko, a Los Alamos scientist working on the asteroid mitigation problem (sub/ad req). He said he’d gotten all the way to the end before he realized it was really a column about global warming. Kaching! Back in the ’90s, I wrote a …