Posts

April 24, 2013

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3:45 PM | 'Workers Town' Fed 10,000 Giza Pyramid Builders

Site yields evidence of nearby cemetery, corral and potential slaughter areas, and lots of animal bones.

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2:26 AM | John Blackburn’s The Face of the Lion

I won’t have many more of these to announce in the future (I swear!), but I wanted to point out that another book by John Blackburn has been released recently that contains an introduction by me — The Face of … Continue reading →

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12:05 AM | Is There Evidence of a Supernova in the Fossils of Ancient Bacteria?

Back when the Time Lord and I were still engaged, we went shopping for wedding rings. He only had one criteria: he wanted his ring to be made of platinum or a similar material forged in a supernova. It’s not quite as exotic as it sounds: most heavy elements were formed in supernovae, via a [...]

April 23, 2013

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10:30 PM | Why Would the TSA Allow Knives on Planes?

The original plan was to speed lines and focus on explosives. That's been put on hold.

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6:19 PM | Vintage Dinosaur Art: more from The How and Why Wonder Book of Dinosaurs

Yes, it's back! After the rapturous reception it received last time, a return to the glorious How & Why Wonder world seemed absolutely necessary - vital, even. This was, after all, the "terrible, terrible book" that proved to be a key source of childhood inspiration for a number of celebrated palaeontologists. Also, how could I have left out this disturbingly anthropomorphic creature last time...?Why, "Trachodon", if it weren't for your alarmingly flattened facial features, you would be […]

April 22, 2013

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8:25 PM | Isaac Newton: The Last Lone Genius?

The Friday before last, with much advanced publicity, the BBC broadcast a new documentary film biography of Isaac Newton with the title The Last Magician. This phrase is part of a famous quote by John Maynard Keynes, “not the first … Continue reading →

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6:52 PM | Mother Earth

Fig.1. “Mother Earth”, the nourisher of all things, from the alchemistic work “Atalanta fugiens” (1618) by Michael Maier (image in public domain). “Surface conditions on Earth, have been for most of geological time regulated by life…[]…This new link between Geology and Biology originated in the Gaia hypothesis” NASA geologist Paul Lowman (2002) In 1965 James [...]

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2:11 AM | An-Ti-Ci-Pa-Tion: The Physics of Dripping Honey

Forget Big Questions like dark matter, dark energy, supersymmetry, and the quest for a grand unified theory for a moment — what we really need physicists to focus on is the mystery of why strands of sweet, sticky honey can get so long and thin as they drip without actually breaking. Inquiring minds want to [...]

April 20, 2013

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5:57 PM | Oh, those movie spies and their cyanide pills

Last spring, I went with my younger son to see the James Bond movie Skyfall. He loved it. I obsessed over one of the major plot points. A chemical one, of course. The villain – a twisted former spy ...

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10:16 AM | Physics Week in Review: April 20, 2013

Let’s face it: this was an unbelievably crappy week, what with the horrific events at the Boston Marathon. People deal with tragedy in many different ways. Jen-Luc Piquant takes comfort in the resiliency of the human spirit, evinced not just in the swell of support for the people of Boston, but in the fact that [...]

April 19, 2013

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7:34 PM | Stonehenge 5,000 Years Older Than Thought

Carbon dating near the monument reveals a settlement occupied between 7,500 and 4,700 BC. ->

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7:17 PM | Geologists in the land of the Kangaroo: The first (and forgotten) geological Exploration of Australia

April 19, 1770 British Captain James Cook reached for the first time the south-eastern coast of Australia. The continent of Australia had been “discovered” by Europeans already in 1606, but only in 1642 the size of the new “island” was realized. However the first geological descriptions of the new continent happened only at the beginning [...]

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2:04 AM | Physicists Tackle the Shrinking Proton Puzzle

Back in 2010, physicists were baffled by the results of an experiment to measure the radius of the proton using an exotic form of hydrogen. It was significantly smaller than expected: 0.00000000000003 millimeters smaller. Maybe that doesn’t seem all that significant, but at the subatomic scale it’s huge — an 8-sigma difference, or around 4% [...]

April 18, 2013

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3:12 PM | J.B. Priestley’s Benighted

Valancourt Books, traditionally specializing in fiction of Edwardian era and older, has recently started printing new editions of excellent but forgotten 20th century novels. I, of course, have written introductions for a number of the books of John Blackburn (Bury … Continue reading →

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12:12 AM | The Giant’s Shoulders #58 is out!

I was a little slow in posting about it, but the 58th edition of the history of science blog carnival, The Giant’s Shoulders, is up at Asylum Science! In this edition, you can read about: cosmonauts who had to survive … Continue reading →

April 17, 2013

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6:54 PM | About Ricin

This week, federal authorities announced that the notoriously lethal poison ricin had been found in two letters - one addressed to President Obama and the other to U.S. Senator Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi). Wired Science blogger Deborah Blum reports on this ...

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4:34 PM | Giants’ Shoulders #58

The good folks at Asylum Science, Mike Finn (@theselflessmeme) and Jen Wallis, have put together a truly excellent selection of the month’s best history of science, technology and medicine bloggage for the fifty-eighth edition of the Giants’ Shoulders blog carnival. … Continue reading →

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4:15 PM | Boston Bombers Chose Troubling Date for Attack

The bombings in Boston recall other April dates in history where domestic extremists led attacks.

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4:05 PM | Oldest European Medieval Cookbook Found

A 12th-century manuscript contains the oldest known European Medieval food recipes. ->

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9:00 AM | Prime Ministers in the Royal Society

On the day that Margaret Thatcher, the last British Prime Minister to be a Fellow of the Royal Society, is...

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7:00 AM | What Is Ricin?

The powdery poison has a nefarious past - and present.

April 16, 2013

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5:49 PM | Help! I’ve just been savaged by a toothless American bulldog.

I really think that the BBC is trying to piss me off this week. First they dish up the total disaster that was Great Lives “Galileo” on Radio 4. Then they present a highly questionable documentary on Isaac Newton on … Continue reading →

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5:12 PM | Bitcoin Trading Prompts Tulip Mania Comparison

What does a 21st century electronic currency have to do with tulips in 1630s Holland? Here's a primer. ->

April 15, 2013

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8:54 PM | Vintage Dinosaur Art: Dreaming of Dinosaurs

Have you ever dreamt of dinosaurs? John Rice surely did, and was thus inspired to write a fine book of poetry about them. Fortunately, his poems tend to be either jolly whimsies or meditations on the meaning and significance of dinosaurs in a temporal context - as opposed to being incomprehensibly surreal and containing psychosexual themes that, on waking reflection, have terrifying implications for one's mental wellbeing (or is that just me?). In line with the mix of tone in the poems, Charles […]

April 13, 2013

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4:26 AM | Physics Week in Review: April 13, 2013

“The annals of theoretical biology are clogged with mathematical models that can be ignored or, when tested, fail.” Biologist E.O. Wilson set off a mini-firestorm with an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal topped by a provocative headline claiming “Great scientists don’t need math.” The actual text was a bit more nuanced than that; Wilson’s [...]

April 12, 2013

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6:00 PM | Most Ancient Port, Hieroglyphic Papyri Found

An 4,500-year-old harbor is discovered, along with ancient diaries and artifacts, on the Red Sea Coast.

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11:00 AM | Tax Cheats Hall of Fame: Photos

As many of the names on this list would surely attest, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) will make you settle up your tab, no matter who you are.

April 11, 2013

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7:14 PM | Body Scanner Tech Finds Man Hidden in Roman Art

When art researchers turned a TSA-style body scanner on a fresco, they got a surprise. ->

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3:56 PM | Solid food, detestable coffee

Like many people I enjoy a good foodie programme, and would love to be invited to any of the amazing...

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12:00 PM | All Yesterdays Contest Winners!

The time has come, friends. Some months ago, we asked for submissions for our very own All Yesterdays Contest. Since then, we've gotten a veritable tsunami of entries, and have had to winnow down a flood of excellent entries to a mere three. It's been an incredibly difficult task, fraught with hair pulling, gnashing of teeth, and quiet weeping in the night. But finally, the white smoke has lifted from the roof, the decisions are made, and out we come, bearing our choices for the winners of […]