As many of you know, ourselves, the earth, all stars and galaxies are made of atoms. These atoms emit light when they are excited and that is how astronomers can explore the vast universe. But this matter only accounts for 4% of the content of the universe while dark matter makes up 22% of it. An unknown type of energy dubbed “dark energy” makes up the remaining 74%.
Following a short film about the omnipresence of math in our everyday lives, whether we notice it or not, four men who eat and breathe mathematics discussed their passion: how they got into math,...
The Royal Society is a Fellowship of 1400 outstanding individuals who represent all areas of science, engineering and medicine and who form a global scientific network of the highest calibre. It exists to expand knowledge, support science and guide policy in the UK, the Commonwealth and all over the world.
Welcome to the TAM London 2010 live blog! From Saturday morning I'll be bringing you regular updates, audio clips, photos and maybe even the odd video clip from The Amazing Meeting, a two day celebration of science and critical thinking.
An ancient bristlecone pine against the Milky Way as a meteor streaks across the sky in the White mountains, California, was the winning entry in this year’s astronomy photographer of the year competition
Join scientists, artists and writers to discuss the interesting, the unusual or provocative in the past, present and future of science, culture and us, over a cup of coffee or drink.
Michael Mosley takes an informative and ambitious journey exploring how the evolution of scientific understanding is intimately interwoven with society's historical path
The NY Times writes about Henry S. Heine, a former Army microbiologist who worked for years with Bruce E. Ivins, whom the FBI has blamed for the anthrax letter attacks that killed five people in 2001. Heine told a 16-member National Academy of Sciences panel reviewing the FBI's scientific work on the investigation that he believes it is impossible that the deadly spores could have been produced undetected in Ivins's laboratory, as the FBI asserts. Heine told the panel that producing the quantity of spores in the letters would have taken at least a year of intensive work using the equipment at the army lab, an effort that would not have escaped colleagues' notice. Lab technicians who worked closely with Ivins have told Heine they saw no such work. Heine adds that, in addition, the biological containment measures where Ivins worked were inadequate to prevent the spores from floating out of the laboratory into animal cages and offices. 'You'd have had dead animals or dead people.' Asked why he is speaking out now, almost two years after Ivins's suicide, Heine says that Army officials had prohibited comment on the case, silencing him until he left the government laboratory. Although Heine does not dispute that there was a genetic link between the spores in the letters and the anthrax in Ivins's flask, Heine says samples from the flask were widely shared. 'Whoever did this is still running around out there. I truly believe that.'
At the end of the seventeenth century, Isaac Newton (1642-1727) initiated a revolution in science. At the end of the twentieth century, scholars began a revolution in the understanding of Newton. As Newton's long-concealed private papers on theology become increasingly accessible, students of Newton's thought are coming to see Newton as more than a scientist.
The National Ignition Facility, or NIF, is a laser-based inertial confinement fusion (ICF) research device under construction at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in Livermore, California, United States. NIF uses powerful lasers to heat and compress a small amount of hydrogen fuel to the point where nuclear fusion reactions take place. NIF is the largest and most energetic ICF device built to date, and the first that is expected to reach the long-sought goal of "ignition", where the fusion reactions become self-sustaining.
Darwin was born 200 years ago, and 50 years later unveiled his theory of natural selection. To mark these anniversaries we bring you the definitive guide to the naturalist's great book, with extracts from key chapters and essays from leading scientists and thinkers including Richard Dawkins and former Bishop of Oxford Richard Harries
Taking Computer Science III means that you are a 1337 h4xx0r, among the likes of Mike Sandy, who almost shut down the ED server but only managed to slow it down, after SOMEHOW managing to find out the ultra-secret EncyclopediaDramatica.com IP address.
Neil Geoffrey Turok holds the Chair of Mathematical Physics (1967) at Cambridge University. He was born in 1958 in Johannesburg, South Africa, the son of Mary and Ben Turok, activists in the anti-apartheid movement and the African National Congress.
Max Tegmark (born 5 May 1967) is a Swedish-American cosmologist. Tegmark is an Associate Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he belongs to the scientific directorate of the Foundational Questions Institute. Currently, he also teaches a relativity class (8.033) to undergraduates at MIT.
Orac is the nom de blog of a (not so) humble pseudonymous surgeon/scientist with an ego just big enough to delude himself that someone, somewhere might actually give a rodent's posterior about his miscellaneous verbal meanderings, but just barely small enough to admit to himself that few will.
Last week the free and open access repository for scientific (mainly physics but also math, computer sciences...) papers arXiv got past 500,000 different papers, not counting older versions of the same article. Especially for physicists, it is the number-one resource for the latest scientific results. Most researchers publish their papers on arXiv before they are published in a 'normal' journal. A famous example is Grisha Perelman, who published his award-winning paper exclusively on arXiv.
Welcome back to the EOL newsletter. For the last
few months, we have been using the feedback on
the first version of EOL to prepare for a new major
release later this year. In December, we will make
EOL into a richer environment with new opportunities
for participation. We are ready to accommodate our
higher-than-anticipated user traffic and we look
forward to sharing our progress with you here.