From Concrete Mathematics: Incidentally, when we’re faced with a “prove or disprove,” we’re usually better off trying first to disprove with a counterexample, for two reasons: A disproof is potentially easier (we just need one counterexample); and nit-picking arouses our…Read more ›

A quick round-up of posts to #chemclub from the past fortnight. Last week, #chemclub was featured at Grand CENtral - so hello to any new readers! On the blogs, a few papers have been discussed in depth. At It's The Rheo Thing, John talks about the glass transition of Teflon, which turns out to be pretty involved. Both C&EN and In the Pipeline featured a recent Science paper about iron-catalysed

How UFO believers make our government more transparent – Yahoo! News. “Every major military agency receives an enormous amount of requests about UFOs.” There is a group of people in America that may be more committed to prying documents from the government than just about anyone else: People who believe that Unidentified Flying Objects are real. UFO believers have been dutifully trying to prove the existence of alien lifeforms for decades, largely by submitting countless […]

Speaking at the meeting Wednesday of the FAA’s Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC) in Washington, NASA administrator Charles Bolden made another pitch—this time to a rather sympathetic audience—for the agency’s commercial crew program. “If NASA had received the president’s requested funding for this program then,” Bolden said, referring to the rollout of the [...]

The latest data on the climate suggests it will warm slightly less, and more slowly, than expected – giving us a chance to avoid the worst effects