Tag Archive | physics
Linkage 9/24: Choking, Mad Scientists, & Relativity at Home
In 1994, Italy’s Roberto Baggio was widely considered to be the best soccer player in the world. Having led his country to the final of the World Cup, played before over 100,000 people in the Rose Bowl, Baggio was the obvious choice to take his team’s critical fifth penalty shot in the shootout that would […]
Linkage 9/3: Science Subway, Sacks, Impossible Goals
We wrote a lot of words this week, about topics ranging from diabetic sex to breast cancer prevention to genome parasites to loneliness treatments. So here’s a lo-fi Linkage: It made for a good story (I should know, I wrote one), but the theory that a catastrophic comet strike only 13,000 years ago wiped out […]
Three Paths to Science
There are many ways to find yourself in a laboratory embarking upon a research career. Some dream of being a scientist from their childhood, mail-ordering chemicals to start a basement lab. Some divert course from the unforgiving pre-medicine track, or chance upon the joys of the bench during a summer internship. Once a student reaches […]
Biological Micro Machines II: Inactivation Station
Last month, we discussed the garage doors of the body’s ion channels, the millions of microscopic machines that control the heart’s beat and the nervous system’s communication. Benoît Roux and his colleagues employed 25 million computational hours to model the potassium channel voltage sensor, a kind of garage door control box that determines when the […]
Computerizing the Chaos of Epilepsy
The electrical symphony of the human brain, with billions of neurons firing at different rates, up to hundreds of times per second, likely looks like chaos to any outside observer. But there are patterns in the ongoing brain activity seen, for instance, on an EEG: slow oscillations, rhythmic coordination, and purposeful ripples of communication. The […]
Linkage 6/4: Mars Mission in a Trailer & Big Tent Science
One of my favorite rides at the Magic Kingdom in Disneyworld was the now-defunct Mission to Mars, a perfect representative of the space age optimism on display in Tomorrowland. For those of you too young to experience it firsthand, it was charmingly simple: a circular theater with video screens above (showing Mars getting bigger) and […]
Video Linkage: Titus Hadron-icus
Last year, I read The God Particle, Leon Lederman and Dick Teresi’s entertainingly wry flyover of the history of physics and the birth of particle accelerator science. My motivation for slotting this heavy subject into my daily commute was the impending activation of the CERN Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, the most powerful particle […]
Nobel Week So Far
The University hasn’t directly won any of the first two Nobel Prizes awarded this week, but one of today’s winners has a UChicago connection: George E. Smith, one of three scientists who will share the $1.4 million prize in physics, received his doctorate at the University of Chicago 50 years ago in 1959. And Monday’s […]
Linkage 8.13: Particle Raps, Lucky Mutants and Twitter Psychology
Our weekly roundup of interesting science from around the web: Where the Higgs At? A Particle Accelerator Rap Battle CERN’s gigantic new Large Hadron Collider had a somewhat tough week, with New York Times reporter James Glantz comparing the $4 billion particle accelerator to an unfinished Mayan pyramid, “another grandiose structure with cosmic aspirations and […]
