Posts

May 07, 2012

+

5:53 PM | Can science save us? Mourdock sees a savior in science

Indiana Treasurer Richard Mourdock has been waiting for someone to ask him about science. The Tea Party-backed candidate has a 10-point lead over U.S. Sen. Richard Lugar in a Hower/DePauw Indiana Battleground Poll heading into Tuesday’s Republican Primary. The poll conducted Monday and Tuesday of last week surveyed 700 likely voters to find Mourdock leading [...]

March 12, 2012

+

12:39 PM | One Year Later, What Does Fukushima Mean for Nuclear Research?

How does a Canadian-American professor of uranium mineralogy living in the unassuming American Midwest respond to the one-year anniversary of Fukushima? He writes a calculated review of what’s known and not known about the behavior of nuclear fuel after a reactor accident. Then he goes back to writing grant proposals, reviewing journal articles and fielding [...]

January 26, 2012

+

1:04 PM | The Disappearing Actinides: And Other Frustrations from the Bottom Row of the Periodic Table of the Elements

I bought three copies of Sam Kean’s The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements. I left the first one in the seat-back pocket of Delta flight 188 from Beijing to Detroit. The second one is sandwiched between ROCK and [...]

November 17, 2011

+

11:24 PM | Science on a Mission: Engineering a Sustainable Future for Haitians without Homes

Suppose, for a moment, that you were presented with an opportunity to put what you learned in the classroom, what you learned in the lab, what you learned in the field to use for the benefit of hundreds of thousands of people. That you could save hundreds of thousands of lives by putting to work [...]

September 21, 2011

+

11:00 AM | Rad Science: Getting to Know Tomorrow’s Nuclear Scientists

Nuclear scientists of tomorrow look and act a lot like any other group of young adults. They wear nice clothes to conferences, they laugh at all my jokes, and they get really excited when they talk about their passions. The difference here is that their passions involve radioactive materials. One of my favorite things about [...]

August 05, 2011

+

3:00 PM | Conversation Piece: The Evolution of Nuclear Science

Michael Lombardi, a former biology and environmental science teacher at Rutherford High School in Panama City, Florida, loved to teach evolution. “I really liked that I could debunk some of the myths,” says Lombardi. “Children have a natural curiosity about the natural world. There is no better time to teach them than when they have [...]