There’s been a great discussion over at Prometheus about a story last week in the New York Times by Bill Broad about atmospheric CO2 and paleoclimate. Given that it’s unlikely that very many people actually get 42 comments into a thread, I’ve pulled out my comment here so all three of Inkstain’s readers (hi Mom!) …
Kind of a sad day yesterday, with the announcement of a recommendation to close the National Solar Observatory’s Sacramento Peak site. Sac Peak is a delight – a little community of astronmers at the end of a winding mountain road where folks gather every day to study the sun. But it’s getting old, and the …
Problems with the National Nuclear Security Administration’s nuclear stockpile surveillance program: Critical tests on eight of the nine weapons in the U.S. stockpile were not done in 2005, the investigators found. As a result, the nation’s military leadership “lacks vital information about the reliability of the stockpile,” the investigators found. “I begin to worry,” said …
If I had full academic library privileges, I’d be dropping everything I had planned this afternoon to read A Study of Odd- and Even-Number Cultures: Japanese prefer odd numbers, whereas Westerners emphasize even numbers, an observation that is clear from the distribution of number-related words in Japanese and English dictionaries. In this article, the author …
Al Zelicoff, on the Department of Energy’s decision to back away from screening polygraphs: First proposed in 1999 by Gov. Bill Richardson — then secretary of energy — during the uproar over alleged spying at the national labs, the lie detector policy elicited the derision of scientists everywhere. The American Psychological Association, the Federation of …
There is much to recommend the nuclear proliferation piece in this morning’s New York Times by Bill Broad and David Sanger. It’s an excellent overview of the situation – how we got here and what can usefully be said about what happens next. I single out the following not because I think it’s the most …
Looks like the National Phenology Network is chugging forward: Over the past two years, Julio Betancourt of the Desert Laboratory has been collaborating with Mark Schwartz of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a group of scientists from various disciplines, federal agencies, academic institutions, and environmental networks to develop a wall-to-wall, coast-to-coast phenology observation network for …
A friend sent along a link to Erika Niedowski’s piece in the Baltimore Sun over the weekend about a bunch of researchers studying extremophiles at the end of the Earth. No politics here, no big breakthroughs, just some delightful writing. As my friend said, “Sometimes a good science story is just a good science story.” …
In which a team of Australian researchers determines the half-life of the teaspoon. It would be easy to jump to conclusions here about the obvious policy responses this suggests, but I think it’s important to remember that science can do no more than inform the political/policy process. What society does with this information is as …
cool new paper: Hainzl et al. show how rain can trigger earthquakes. stuff I wrote elsewhere: Wave in Alaska busts up iceberg off Antarctica (no big scoop here, every science writer with an angle has been doing this story, ’cause it’s so insanely cool) music: One of my favorite classic rock songs is Jim Hendrix’s …