In the last few years, the sun-to-power efficiency of perovskites has surged at an unprecedented rate. This material is easier to use than conventional silicon, and if scientists can figure out the right way to keep it stable, it could be the future of solar power. I wrote about the stuff in this story from […]
Perovskite’s solar promise Read More »
Michael McQuilken will never forget the day lightning struck his younger brother. On August 20, 1975, he and Sean hiked to the top of Moro Rock together with their sister Mary and her friend Margie. This granite dome resides in California’s Sequoia National Park. As dark clouds gathered overhead, a light rain started
Where will lighting strike? Read More »
NASA’s Dawn spacecraft recently reached the orbit of Ceres, a dwarf planet and the largest object in the asteroid belt. Read more about the journey here.
How we got to Ceres Read More »
There’s so much snow in the movie Frozen that the cold white stuff might as well be the star of the animated film. It falls, flies, piles and melts. Snow sprays through the air as Anna and Kristoff cling to a reindeer-pulled sleigh, barely escaping a pack of snarling wolves. Snow dances in the air
Science in Hollywood Read More »
Jerry Zucker! Natalie Portman! Arthur C. Clarke! My article about the Science & Entertainment Exchange is now up at PNAS.
Science behind the scenes Read More »
Paleontologists have long faced a daunting obstacle to their research: Fossils are usually embedded in rock. To manually wrench the fossils out, scientists use an array of tools, from needles to dentist’s drills to dissolving acids, often with destructive results. Swedish paleozoologist Erik Jarvik, for example, famously took 25 years to create a precise, anatomically
Freeing the dinos within Read More »
April is Mathematics Awareness Month. April is alsoNational Poetry Month. Coincidence? Yep, almost definitely. But it’s also an opportunity: I’d like to propose that we—you and I, at least until the end of this blog post—merge the two and celebrate the first-ever Mathematical Poetry Month. No fooling. Connecting math to poetry isn’t a new idea. Archimedes
Can an Equation be a Poem? Read More »
On February 22, festival-goers at Melbourne’s dusk-to-dawn White Night celebration lined up in droves outside the State Library of Victoria for an intimate evening with herpes. And they got it, in a big way: Bobbling around on the 40-meter-diameter central dome on the ceiling of the library’s La Trobe Reading Room was a bright and
Supersized Viruses Read More »
Ong uyan madongo? You probably don’t know how to answer that question — unless you happen to be one of the roughly 430 people in the world who speak a language called Matukar Panau. Then you would know it means, “How are you?” Matukar Panau is one of the world’s rarest languages. It is
Saving endangered ‘tongues’ Read More »
According to ancient historians, Archimedes spent the last moments of his life drawing figures in the dirt, so deeply entranced with the pleasures of geometry that he failed to notice the bloody pillage of Syracuse right outside his door. Aloofness, it’s tempting to conjecture, was his fatal flaw. By many accounts, he paid scant attention when
Archimedes in the Fence Read More »
