Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
There has quite appropriately been an abundance of news and excitement regarding the first observation of gravitational-waves from a pair of inspiraling neutron stars. Most media outlets have been covering it, for example … Washington Post – Scientists detect gravitational waves from a new kind of nova, sparking a new era in astronomy The Guardian – … Read more
A new study grants us a bit of further insight into how a warming ocean is impacting the Antarctic. Entitled “Channelized Melting Drives Thinning Under a Rapidly Melting Antarctic Ice Shelf”, it was published a few days ago in Geophysical research Letters (full open access). It describes how the ocean is eating away underneath the Dotson … Read more
Putting both Dark Matter and also Dark Energy aside, if you look at everything we can see, all the galaxies, then it has been rather clear that a lot was missing, or to be a tad more precise, had not actually been observed. How was that known? Well, basically what should be there had been … Read more
We know that Earth is 4.54 ± 0.05 billion years old. There are no rocks from Earth that old because the process of plate tectonics has recycled anything of that era, so the estimate for this age is based upon the probable age of the Solar System. Basically the assumption is that all the solid bodies in the … Read more
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2017 to Jacques Dubochet University of Lausanne, Switzerland Joachim Frank Columbia University, New York, USA and Richard Henderson MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK “for developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high-resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution” Like its … Read more
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics 2017 with one half to Rainer Weiss LIGO/VIRGO Collaboration and the other half jointly to Barry C. Barish LIGO/VIRGO Collaboration and Kip S. Thorne LIGO/VIRGO Collaboration “for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves” It … Read more
