From the press release:
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2006 to
Roger D. Kornberg
Stanford University, CA, USA
“for his studies of the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcriptionâ€.
Here’s a bit more on the background: […] Click to continue reading this post
Believe it or not, the SEA (Scientists and Engineers for America), about which I blogged recently, was on the Colbert Report last night! Video here […] Click to continue reading this post
Well, here’s a bit of news. For one reason or another, I have been invited to a preview, later this month, of the soon-to-be-reopened Griffith Observatory, and so will get to see it before it opens to the very general public. (Library photos, by E. C. Krupp, by the way.) I will try my best to bring you a full report on the splendiforous contents… assuming they […] Click to continue reading this post
COBE is the experiment that really blazed the trail for all the wonderful physics that was to come from WMAP, and various other experiments such as Boomerang. And Planck is about to fly as well, giving even more precise information about our universe.
I was an undergraduate when this was announced. [Update: Oops…not quite: I had just started graduate school. Thanks Chad!] It was a wonderful feeling that all of us students had, partly gleaned from the feelings of our lecturers, I suspect. The thing that struck us as most appealing (I think) was the idea that the black body radiation spectrum (click on the image on the right for larger) that we’d been learning about in the abstract, during lectures, was sort of “out there”, writ large…. as large as can be in fact, on the whole universe! It’s always good to learn that physics -or any field- is still alive, especially when you’re still on the cusp of making a career in it. […] Click to continue reading this post
I’ve previously mentioned examples of the manipulation or suppression of scientific information by organisations such as the Bush Administration. See for example a recent post on hurricanes and global warming. Various scientists have made it their business to speak out against these types of wrongs, either as individuals in the line of fire, as individuals noticing it in the news and blogging about it to as many as care to read, and as part of organisations here and abroad.
Well I’d like to point out a new organisation I heard about* called “Scientists and Engineers for America”, and I am pleased to share with you that their website says:
[…] Click to continue reading this post
As mentioned before, I am really excited about the re-opening of the Griffith Park Observatory. See this earlier post. [Update: See post about my viisit here.] [Further Update: After reading the rest of the post, be sure to read the comments (starting here) for some commentary on the planetarium show … Click to continue reading this post
Anton Kapustin, yesterday, in the middle of what he called (not seriously) “the scary statement” of the Geometric Langlands duality…. Part of the audience, receiving the news…. The SCSS is going well. More later. Must go get my bus now so that I can start the Saturday session… -cvj
In the continued public discussion of the treatment of Yau’s reputation by the New Yorker article (by Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber), to which I earlier referred (see here, and see the post about Yau’s response here), there has been a recent significant development. I don’t mean the press conference of last week, held by Yau’s entourage (…did anyone see that? I could not log on… there is archived video avaialble here. I still can’t view it…reports are welcome).
No, I’m talking about the public letter attributed to Richard Hamilton, the mathematician at Columbia University […] Click to continue reading this post
This is the Bush Administration’s war on science, I mean. There’s lots we don’t hear about, I’m sure, but there has been a new discussion ignited by an article in Nature yesterday. I found this article on Associated Press by Randolph E. Schmidt. Seems that there was a report being prepared at NOAA (National Oceanographic and Atmospherica Administration) about hurricanes:
Click to continue reading this post
This may well be the best news I’ll ever give on this blog- if you love cats (like I do), and if you are allergic to them (like many are). It seems that the first commercially available hypoallergenic cat is now being shipped (or whatever you do to get new pets to customers). I learned from the journal Nature that […] Click to continue reading this post
Well, before disappearing into a long session of thinking about some funny behaviour my strings are up to (more later) I’d like to do a quick report on the departmental colloquium that I went to just now. We had Gary Zank, the Director of the Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics of the UC system (he’s based out of UCR) give us a talk entitled: “Particle Acceleration in Cosmic Plasmas”, and it was quite fascinating (and very well presented).
It is all about the physics of cosmic rays […] Click to continue reading this post
On Friday and Saturday of next week (September 29th and 30th), the next Southern California Strings Seminar will be happening! It’s a regional meeting for people doing research in string theory and related topics, and as I’ve said before, I’d especially like to see more young people come out and … Click to continue reading this post
In more news from the battle to get action on Global Warming, from Reuters a short while ago: Billionaire Virgin Group Chairman Richard Branson on Thursday committed an estimated $3 billion over the next 10 years, or all of the profits from his airline and rail businesses, to combating global … Click to continue reading this post
So I think maybe I died and went to cvj heaven. Let me explain. I mentioned to you a while ago the freshman seminar entitled “The Art and Science of Seeing and the Seeing and Science of Art”, for which there was an enrollment snafu. Well, […] Click to continue reading this post
When the President of the Union of Concerned Scientists, Kevin Nobloch, spoke to an audience at the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies earlier this year (July) on the subject of Global Warming, he very much emphasized the initiative of individual states as a means by which progress can be made while the Federal Government spins its tires, and does all that it does to suppress supporting scientific information. He did a very good job of talking about the spectrum of effects that global warming has on individual states, and the spectrum of activities that individual states can […] Click to continue reading this post
