Get yourself out this evening about an hour before sunset and look to the southwest horizon for a wonderful conjunction of Venus, Jupiter and a new crescent Moon. We spotted an early version of this (before the moon was in position) and thought they were a couple of airplanes, they were so bright.
This is outrageously cool.
The HST took this visible-light photo of an extrasolar planet — the first ever — orbiting the star Fomalhaut.
3 a.m. found me lying on my back on a tennis court, watching the northern sky for the Perseids meteor shower. We saw a handful, and it was good. But it’s also why I’m not writing a longer post.
And why not? When my kids were old enough to collect plush toys they learned the names of all the Beanie Babies. And what’s that going to do for them when they work on their PhD in physics at Berkeley? Nowhere, that’s where.
Here’s an amazing gallery of photos of the volcano during a thunderstorm. 
Cosmic Variance talks about Influence, and what grad students can do to best position themselves for future success. But this blog post, while on the surface about physics PhD candidates and post-docs, strikes me in the same way as “The Inner Game Of Tennis,” in which you can easily play out the metaphor to whatever [...]
This has gotten a lot of attention in media that we nerds pay attention to, but not much elsewhere. Last week something blew up deep in space.
If you’d been looking up at the sky at that time, you’d have set several records. You’d have seen the furthest naked-eye-visible object. Seven and a half billion light [...]
A collection of photographs of actual nuclear and thermonuclear detonations from Trinity through a Chinese test of 1967.
A frightening thing I noticed is the scale, or rather, the lack of scale, as the detonations became more powerful. The Operation Crossroads tests of 1946 rated 21 kilotons. In the images, easily identifiable markets give the [...]
Take a look at the animation on the jump page. Do you see the dancer spinning clockwise or counterclockwise? If clockwise, you’re right-brained. If counterclockwise, left. There’s a poll attached, so please register your predeliction.
Orgtheory highlights the result of a poll done by a scientific group, including the questions “Now, does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth?,” and “How long does it take for the Earth to go around the Sun: one day, one month, or one year?”
The surprising results: a [...]
Thanks to Cosmic Variance for pointing this out, one of the most airtight arguments yet for creationism over evolution:
“One of the most basic laws in the universe is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This states that as time goes by, entropy in an environment will increase. Evolution argues differently against a law that is [...]
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