Category Archives: science

Explaining Cosmic Rays

By | | , , ,
3 Comments

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 →

Well, That’s a Novel Approach

By | | , ,
1 Comment

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 →

Flying Clams

By | | , ,
1 Comment

There’s a lovely new book (or it sounds that way) out on Darwin. It’s a biography by David Quammen, called “The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution”. There was a very nice radio piece on it on NPR’s Morning Edition, on the segment by Robert Krulwich, with an interview with the author. I recommend it, as it is a very pleasant conversation that does not dumb everything down, for a change. From the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Yau Fights Back?

By | | , ,
32 Comments

Well… yikes! Remember my article on the New Yorker piece on the Fields Medal, the Poincare Conjecture, and the mathematicians Perelman and Yau? Remember that I said:

I cannot comment upon whether the hero of the story (Grigory Perelman) is as heroic as painted, or whether the villian of the piece (Shing-Tung Yau) is really as villainous. The anecdotes that are used to do the painting may well be able to be supplemented by other anecdotes that tell another story, as is sometimes the case. I simply don’t know.

Well, it seems that Yau is quite sure that it is not going to stop there. There was a letter sent to the New Yorker and the authors of the article (apparently) on his behalf by legal counsel. It is discussed and can be found on a web page under Yau’s name. The page is in the form of a press release, and I quote: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Converting The Enemy

By | | , ,
6 Comments

An interesting development in the world of chemistry caught my eye just now. Imagine taking that carbon dioxide that is in so many of our emissions, and that is one of the principal agents in the processes contributing to global warming, and using solar energy, converting it into fuel. Now that would really be an interesting possibility, wouldn’t it?

Well, it is possible. Whether it will ever be a viable scheme that makes any practical sense is another matter, but you’ve got to start somewhere. A team of chemists represented by Gabriele Centi of the University of Messina (Italy) presented new results on this process to the American Chemical Society meeting in San Francisco. From New Scientist:
Click to continue reading this post →