Category Archives: science

Chocolaty Book Fun

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Ah yes, it is that time of year again. The LA Times book festival is on, starting today, and it was kicked off with the swanky Book Awards festival last night, followed by a reception. This all takes place on the UCLA campus, in Westwood. You might recall that I went last year and reported on it. [(Update: A version of the post is here.] (If in town, go to the LA Times website for more information and find your way over there either today or tomorrow!)

So I went to the Awards show again because:

  1. I enjoyed it last year,
  2. I like “book people”,
  3. I like the idea that in the city where there’s a swanky Awards ceremony for everything else, they have one for books,
  4. I like the unashamed delight that everyone takes in the value of the word on the page… there were some very nice speeches from the master of ceremonies (Jim Lehrer this year) and the various presenters in each category (all authors themselves) about the various aspects of this (all the way from history to Children’s books, to Science…)
  5. I wanted to see if they would have chocolate fountains again. They did.
  6. I wanted to see if they had old typewriters embedded inside ice sculptures again. They did.
  7. I can never be mistaken for an actual author at the reception too many times,
  8. I like dressing up, from time to time. (Never let it be said that I am not honest with you on this blog.)

book prizes   book prizes

(Above: MC for the night, PBS Newshour host Jim Lehrer, and the LA Times’ Kenneth Turan, on the set/stage. I really like the work of both of these guys…)

Spent most of the evening after the ceremony at the reception talking with LA Times (or related) people and their spouses. This was not my intention, but it was a happy occurrence, as they were all really interesting people – two science writers (Rosie Mestel and Alan Zarembo, who I’d not met before and who were just great to talk to) and also some more general columnists, such as (novellist and essayist) Meghan Daum and others whose names escape me now. K C Cole, my friend and USC colleague – and ex-LA Times science writer – was there for good conversation, as was Tom Siegfried. So it was just excellent to stand around and munch on the excellent food, drink the wine, and talk (and yes, sometimes gripe) a bit about science coverage and science writing. Briefly chatted with poet and author Michael Datcher (remember him from the point of view event?) and his wife as well, who told me about an upcoming event I’ll be mentioning later, I hope.

Rosie and I turned out to have some interesting points of commonality, which was a pleasant surprise, and so we talked about not just science and science-writing, but England, gardening, and the East/West divide in Los Angeles.

book prizes

(Above: Available light (sorry) shot of Alan Zarembo dipping a bit of pineapple into the chocolate fountain. Meghan Daum and Rosie Mestel look on.)

Some friends and colleagues from USC were there in an official capacity as well, such […] Click to continue reading this post →

When Worlds Collide, III

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Well, the cat’s out of the bag. Since Tuesday, in fact. What am I talking about? I’m going to get so beaten up in the playground for this…

casino royaleWell, I did a post a while ago about a trip I did to New York to take part in a day long shoot for a magazine, all dressed up in my tuxedo on a “Casino Royale” themed set. You can read about it in full here. What was the point? Reaching out. More science in the public domain, and on the lips of the regular person on the street. The usual things you know (from my writing here and elsewhere) that I’m passionate about. The readership of the magazine in question is not commonly exposed to images of scientists. The world of science and practicing scientists hardly intersects with the world of R&B, hip-hop, sports, fashion, the primary foci of this magazine and many others. I see no reason why not, but those who work in the media that control most of the images we see think otherwise.

Except for some creative people at King magazine. King magazine is a men’s magazine aimed primarily at young African Americans. (See a Wikipedia summary here, and the magazine website here. Warning! This is a men’s magazine aimed at a very specific demographic/readership, and while it does not warrant being on those shelves in the store that are behind the black glass, it is decorated from cover to interior in a manner that is… shall we say “somewhat differently” from the magazines I usually point to, such as SEED, National Geographic, or Scientific American! Ok?)

Every year, King magazine does a feature shoot of a group of people making interesting noises in their respective fields, people that you’ve either heard from (if you’re into those fields, and sometimes even not) or that they expect you’ll hear from soon. It’s all glossy and fun and so forth, and they decided (to my lasting surprise) to call me and ask if I’d take part. Hence the New York trip. The magazine is out on the stands now, and you can go and look at it.

I took the liberty of making some scans of the pictures for you (I hope the magazine’s staff don’t mind!), since I’d teased you so much in the last post with some of the shots I took, but could not reveal details about who was in the group, etc. There’s more in the actual magazine, such as quotes from the subjects about their work, life, etc.

So here goes:

[…] Click to continue reading this post →

Point of View, II – The Event

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Thursday 12th’s “Point of View, II” event was a huge success. See here for the blurb on what was coming up. Below I intersperse that with a little about what actually took place, and give you a link to video of the event.

One of the great things about the format is that we’ve no clear idea what each presenter is going to do, where they will take things in their examination of the theme, so it adds somewhat to the excitement of the events. Do come along to some of the Categorically Not! events (of the same type) which happen every month at Santa Monica airport. Web link here.

Don Marolf of UCSB will tell us what Einstein’s relativity REALLY means to the physicists who study our world. Different observers’ perceptions of space, and even of time itself can give different answers. How do we make sense of that, and what are the consequences?

don marolfWe started with Don Marolf (click left for larger), who did a really great job of telling the audience about what the theme “Point of View” meant to physicists, in the context of Relativity. He had some great computer slides, but in addition he produced various items from his pockets during the talk to use as props to illustrate things. Don is an excellent presenter with a huge amount of charm and energy and an infectious laugh and so gave us a great start to the evening.

Poet and author Michael Datcher, who teaches literary nonfiction and poetry at Loyola Marymount University, will talk about the role of the writer as a witness and also his newly launched journal of literary nonfiction, The Truth about the Fact.

michael datcherWe then went in a very different direction with Michael Datcher […] Click to continue reading this post →

Another Earth?

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Spotted on the BBC News website: A story about the discovery of an earth-like (or at least more Earth-like than Jupiter-like) planet in the “Goldilocks” zone of a star a mere 20 light years or so away!

another earthThe planet orbits the faint star Gliese 581, which is 20.5 light-years away in the constellation Libra.

Scientists made the discovery using the Eso 3.6m Telescope in Chile.

They say the benign temperatures on the planet mean any water there could exist in liquid form, and this raises the chances it could also harbour life.

“We have estimated that the mean temperature of this ‘super-Earth’ lies between 0 and 40 degrees Celsius, and water would thus be liquid,” explained Stephane Udry of the Geneva Observatory, lead author of the scientific paper reporting the result.

“Moreover, its radius should be only 1.5 times the Earth’s radius, and models predict that the planet should be either rocky – like our Earth – or covered with oceans.”

Reading a bit further on: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Red Square

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Have a look at this lovely image of the Red Square nebula:

red square nebula

It’s been making the news recently because (in addition to being a rather strikingly beautiful image – the colours should not be taken too seriously, as it is actually an infrared image) it is an extremely symmetrical object. Surprisingly and unprecedentedly so, apparently. A nebula of this sort (with a dying star, MWC 922 […] Click to continue reading this post →

Point of View, II

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The second of the Point of View campus events in the Visions and Voices series is on Thursday. It is at 7:00pm at the Gin Wong conference center (which is near Fine Arts and Architecture, by the way.) See the bottom of this post for some earlier events of this type, and this post for the background on Visions and Voices.

This time we’ll have a Poet, a Dancer, and a Physicist! Here’s some blurb that KC Cole (my co-conspirator in this business) wrote about who is appearing and what they’ll be saying:
[…] Click to continue reading this post →

MiniBooNE for Neutrinos

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MiniBoone
(Image from the MiniBooNE archive. This depicts a neutrino signal in the detector. )

There was a new result announced today. The MiniBoone collaboration has confirmed the more “standard” scenario for neutrino oscillations, and ruled out suggestions by an earlier experiment (LSND3) from a while back that might have implied the existence of sterile neutrinos. Two commenters, Scott H. and Bee, alerted me to this in another thread. Rather than me trying to paraphrase things, I’m going to first reproduce Scott H.’s comment here (he came back from a colloquium by Jocelyn Monroe on the topic earlier today): […] Click to continue reading this post →

Quark Soup Al Dente

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Here’s Rob Myers in action, giving Monday’s excellent departmental colloquium, entitled “Quark Soup Al Dente: Applied String Theory”:

robert c myers quark soup al dente

Here was his abstract:

In recent years, experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider have discovered an exotic new state of matter known as the quark-gluon plasma. Simple theoretical considerations suggested that this plasma would behave like an ideal gas, however, the experiments show that it actually behaves very much like an ideal liquid. Thus the standard theoretical tools, such as perturbation theory and lattice gauge theory, are poorly suited to understand this new phase. However, recent progress in superstring theory has provided us with a theoretical laboratory for studying very similar systems of strongly interacting hot non-abelian plasmas. This surprising new perspective extracts the fluid properties of the plasma from physical processes in a black hole spacetime. At present, this approach seems to provide some of the best tools which theoretical physicists have to understand the heavy ion collisions at RHIC.

For a very good blog post on this issue, see Bee and Stefan’s post at Backreaction.

It was really excellent to see Rob and spend some time with him at dinner afterwards and at lunch the next day with my students. We got to chat over a nice Tapas-style meal and catch up a bit on what each other has been up to (both in and out of physics – Rob is one of my most long standing friends and collaborators in the field), and he even gave us a seminar on Tuesday before leaving.

Now, here’s a physics question for you: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Small Things Considered

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What small things? Elementary particles! The second of David Kestenbaum’s excellent report on CERN’s LHC aired yesterday on NPR’s All Things Considered. You can see what I said about the first part here, and the second part can be listened to on the NPR website here. There’s also more video, extra audio, and a transcript.

atlas detector
(Image: The seven story tall Atlas detector at the LHC. (photo: Serge Bellegarde))

The focus on this one broadens out to marvel at the sheer scale of the experiment as a civil engineering feat, and also as a feat of human cooperation (consider the many countries, languages, different people, etc, who are collaborating to make this happen). It’s great to hear the many voices of the various scientists he talks to.

(It’s also great, on a personal note, to hear Jim Virdee (the CMS spokesperson) […] Click to continue reading this post →

NPR goes to LHC

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National Public Radio’s David Kestenbaum, who’s quite reliably an excellent reporter whose field reports I always enjoy, did a report on CERN’s (soon to be switched on) Large Hadron Collider (see also a Wiki here) today! Or rather, it was played on this morning’s Morning Edition. Here’s the site where you can listen to an archived version of the report, and read a transcript of some of it. It’s rather well done.

CMS Higgs simulation event

(Image: A simulation from the CMS experiment – part of the LHC – showing the decay of the Higgs particle after being created in one of the high energy collisions.)

It starts with a few theoretical physicist clichés in the introductory remarks leaving up to talking to Alvaro De Rujula, but it’s fine – not really too over the top, and done with good humour. Really good is that fact that once the physics issues start being discussed and described, he focuses on doing that well. The bottom line is that if your subject -the science- is good, that should take center stage in forming the core of the report for attracting and holding the audience’s attention.

And report does it well. Through interview and Kestenbaum filling in with further […] Click to continue reading this post →

Mexican Superlattices

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I grew some decent crystals once when I was younger. Perhaps you did too? It’s an excellent (and cheap) science project for a young person to do, so do encourage them to have a go, whenever you get the chance.

Whatever you do, perhaps it is not a good idea to show them these giant selenite (gypsum) crystals first:

mexico crystals

Fantastic aren’t they?! (Click for larger view.) They are in some truly extraordinary […] Click to continue reading this post →

Finding Your Way

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Here’s a map of science*!

map of science

map of science keyThe work, by Richard Klavans and Kevin Boyack, shows aspects of the connectivity of relations between scientific disciplines (colour key to the left), based on analysis of about 1.6 million scientific articles. Rather pretty isn’t it? And, yes, of course, very interesting to see the connectivity visualized like that.

Please visit their website to see how to visually slice all of this to highlight areas of the map by (a limited selection of) countries, regions, institutions, blue vs red state (!), etc.

There’s more information about the relationships in this Seed article, where there’s a […] Click to continue reading this post →

The First Green Shoots of Recovery?

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From the BBC, I learned that there’s been an unexpected turn around in science education in the UK:

The latest statistics from the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service on applications to join full-time degree courses, show double-figure percentage rises compared with the same time last year for physics, chemistry, mathematics, engineering and technology.

The speculations have begun:

While admission officers admit that they are baffled by this sudden and unexpected surge in interest, many secondary school and university tutors are convinced this is a result of long hard work by many working our education system.

“We really make a point of doing fun, practical things with all pupils when it comes to the sciences,” said Richard West, the head of science and physics at St Peter’s Collegiate School in Wolverhampton.

“We are encouraging after school science activities like astronomy and animal clubs and taking part in national competitions.”

Various other possible reasons are discussed as well, such as: […] Click to continue reading this post →

A Fair Cop

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RibenaSoon time to sign up to help judge the California State Science Fair. I hope I can make it. Just to reassure you that not every entry is another trebuchet (just the physics, mechanics, etc., section and you’ll know what I mean), here’s a story about two schoolgirls from New Zealand, Jenny Suo and Anna Devathasan, who decided to test the claims of GlaxoSmithKline that their product – cartoned ready-to-drink Ribena – has high Vitamin C content. They set out to show that cheaper drinks were less healthy than Ribena, and found to their surprise that there were only trace amounts of Vitamin C at best.

I’m a bit shocked by this since I love Ribena, and grew up with it for years. I seem to remember that some of the largest writing on the packaging is about the huge amount of Vitamin C that you’re going to get. Admittedly, it’s not the vitamin C aspect that attracted me to it, of course -I just love the taste! But all the same, it’s a bit disappointing….

From an article by Mike Steere: Click to continue reading this post →