Category Archives: science

Odd Direction For Compass

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AlethiometerOn Friday after a very busy week (the last teaching week of the semester), I decided to go to a 21+ screening at the Arclight. This splendid event is held in a special part of the Arclight complex which means that you can buy a cocktail (gin and tonic in my case, made with Tanqueray No. Ten) and wander into the movie theatre with it and relax in a comfy chair and watch a movie for two hours.

Hmm… Sounds good. Was good. Why don’t I do this every Friday?

What I saw was about multiple universes and particle physics. Oh, and fighting polar bears. […] Click to continue reading this post →

Swept

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Not a big surprise, but a notable event nonetheless – the top Siemens Mathematics, Science and Technology annual prizes were all taken by girls this year. From the New York Times*:

Janelle Schlossberger and Amanda Marinoff, both 17 and seniors at Plainview-Old Bethpage John F. Kennedy High School on Long Island, split the first prize — a $100,000 scholarship — in the team category for creating a molecule that helps block the reproduction of drug-resistant tuberculosis bacteria.

Isha Himani Jain, 16, a senior at Freedom High School in Bethlehem, Pa., placed first in the individual category for her studies of bone growth in zebra fish, whose tail fins grow in spurts, similar to the way children’s bones do. She will get a $100,000 scholarship.

Congratulations to them – and all the winners and finalists, male or female – for their achievements!!

On another note, I was reading the project descriptions of the rather well-resourced […] Click to continue reading this post →

Southern California Strings Seminar

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michael gutperle talking at the first SCSS at USC, Sept. 2005The next regional string meeting is a one-day one at UCLA, organized by Michael Gutperle and Per Kraus. It’s going to be full of interesting talks and conversations, as usual. Please encourage your graduate students to come, especially, since special effort is made to make sure that each talk begins with a pedagogical portion to help non-experts in that subfield navigate and see the motivation. (Photo: Michael Gutperle talking at the first SCSS at USC, Sept. 2005; click for larger view.)

The speakers are: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Cosmic Holey Moley!

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A quick note of interest, particularly to those interested in these science outreach matters:

Last night’s “Cosmic Holes” episode on the History Channel (part of their new science series “The Universe” – see here and here) apparently had an unusually huge audience. Word must be getting around that the History Channel’s got this fun and informative new series, and it is spreading beyond their standard viewers it seems. Apparently the episode’s first showing at 9:00pm got well over a million viewers, which I’ve heard the Channel was rather pleased about.
[…] Click to continue reading this post →

The Universe Tomorrow

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Over on Correlations, I talked a bit about the History Channel’s science show “The Universe” (as I have here), and pointed out that the new season (season two) has already begun being broadcast. Here’s hoping that it’s a good series of programmes that will be enjoyable and informative. The show’s website is here.

Well, I’ve learned that the second episode, tomorrow’s (showing at 9:00pm), is one of those that i did some shooting for over the last two months at a number of places around LA. Rather than repeat, here’s what I said:

The next one, to air on Tuesday the 4th December, is called “Cosmic Holes” (yeah, I know), and the subject matter will be right on the edge of the known and the unknown, talking about black holes, white holes, and wormholes. While we know that the first are out there, the second two, while also solutions of Einstein’s General Relativity, are still theoretical constructs (and not without problems). The show explores some of the ideas and the prospects for the ideas surrounding

[…] Click to continue reading this post →

Bosonic Taxes?

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So this is one of those “what are the odds?” situations that I seem to have from time to time. It is time to pay my property taxes, and so with the twice annual tears in my eyes I went to the website of the Los Angeles County Treasurer and Tax Collector to hand over the loot electronically. There’s some entering of data to indicate to the site precisely what property is in question, but before proceeding you’re taken to a page with a captcha (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). Here it is (click for larger view.):

property taxes, boson

The random word I had to type was “boson”. Isn’t that odd?!

For those of you who don’t know, this is a term in physics -my field- for particles that […] Click to continue reading this post →

The Flat Universe

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chuck steidelkc coleWhile searching through their site to find something else, I noticed that there was a conversation on KPCC’s Zocalo between science writer K C Cole and Astrophysicist Chuck Steidel not long ago. Have a look at their listing of past conversations here – there’s a lot of good stuff about various topics and people in the Los Angeles area. I listened to it, and it’s very interesting indeed.

It is not quite your usual light touch conversation that you hear on public radio – it is a little more involved, taking you a bit further (without losing you) and gives you more insights into the work, the puzzles, the discoveries and the hopes for future ones. As a journalist, and the guest host of the program, K C Cole knows her material, and so is able to steer things rather well, while inserting useful remarks to help the listener keep up. This might be perfect listening if you want to get a sense of what it’s like to work in Chuck’s area of expertise (finding and characterizing the youngest galaxies and understanding their cosmological implications), either out of general curiosity or if you’re planning a career in that area. Take out some time and have a listen. Here’s the blurb from the site:
[…] Click to continue reading this post →

Möbius Transformations

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This short video is simply lovely. It illustrates (with perfectly chosen music) an important set of mathematical transformations dear to many of us, the Möbius transformations. It is by Douglas Arnold and Jonathan Rogness of the University of Minnesota. It’s a pleasure to watch, whether you work in a mathematically related field or not. Try it:



Also worth looking at (for a host of other reasons) are the comments on the video from […] Click to continue reading this post →

Alexey Zamolodchikov

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alexey zamolodchikovSome weeks ago, I learned that Alexey Zamolodchikov died. Many of you who are theoretical physicists will definitely know the name, as the name Zamolodchikov is all over the fields of statistical physics and integrable systems, conformal field theory, string theory, and Liouville theory, for example: It would be either him, his twin brother Alexander, or both of them that you’ll have certainly encountered on that paper that was crucial to your work in one or several ways. (Photo (2000) by Craig Tracy. I found it here.)

I did not know him personally, and so will not go on at length here, but given how much his contributions have filtered into so much of what I’ve been doing since I was a graduate student (I remember being, as a student far away from the centre of activity in the field, somewhat fascinated with those papers […] Click to continue reading this post →

Antarctic Antics

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Tamsin Grayantarctic research stationsMy Correlations colleague Tamsin Gray has been updating us on her activities down in Antarctica. I still find it remarkable that there are people regularly going down there, doing all sorts of scientific experiments at several stations. Click the map on the right for a larger view of the layout of the many stations down there. Keep an eye out for Tamsin’s posts – not the least because there are occasionally pictures of cute penguins – to get an idea of some of the things her team are up to.

Recently, for example, Tamsin told us about some new (toys) tools they were working with – tiny airplanes! They fly around and do meteorological measurements.

Over on Correlations I did a post about Antarctica that briefly mentioned some of the physics being done there (AMANDA and IceCube, the neutrino telescopes), but the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Stem Cell Timeline

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wisconsin-madison image skin cellsNot surprisingly, there’s been a lot of interesting chatter about the recently announced stem cell research results I blogged about earlier. I did a longer blog post over on Correlations that might interest you (I managed to think of the pun for the title that I knew was in there somewhere, but could not manage it this morning over here).

Mentioned there are two more NPR items I thought were of note: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Stem Cell News

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kyoto nerve cell imageYou may have heard about the new stem cell breakthrough in the news. It seems to be quite significant – researchers (at Kyoto University and at Wisconsin-Madison) have managed to make human skin cells into stem cells (following on work done in mouse some announced some months back). If interested in the details (as I’m sure you are) you can read more about it in an AP story on the NPR web site here. (Yahoo’s version has pictures, such as the nerve cells above left from the Kyoto group. – try and spot the odd one out in their 14 image slide show.)

There was also a very informative chat about it with one of their science correspondents, Joe Palca, on Morning Edition, and you can listen to it here. There’ll […] Click to continue reading this post →