Category Archives: Science

Counterexample

From Scientific American: Researchers insist they can tell someone’s politlcal affiliation by looking at the condition of their offices and bedrooms. Messy? You’re a lefty. A neatnik? Welcome to the Right. According to a controversial new study, set to be published in The Journal of Political Psychology, the bedrooms and offices of liberals, who are […]

A Stellar Open-Source Application

Last night my wife and I could see a bright planet shining above the trees, which is unusual for being in Boston. We didn’t know what it was, but I knew how to find out after just having read about Stellarium.

Powers of Ten

This short film is a lot of fun, or at least you might think so if you like space, science, physics, and math, or you’re bit nostalgic about those films they showed you in grade school science class. By the way, I instantly recognized the narrator as former MIT professor Philip Morrison, who hosted a […]

Faith in Science

A Toronto Star reporter weighs in on the relative permanence of mathematics and physics. Read his comment, then consider this: which is someone more likely to use today, the Pythagorean Theorem or Heraclitus’s theories of matter? Currently, encryption is based largely on complex numerical codes that even the most sophisticated computers would, theoretically, fail to […]

Armchair Archeology

Using satellite images from Google Maps and Google Earth, an Italian computer programmer has stumbled upon the remains of an ancient villa. Luca Mori was studying maps of the region around his town of Sorbolo, near Parma, when he noticed a prominent, oval, shaded form more than 500 metres long. It was the meander of […]

Very Cool

Dave Williams has developed a refrigeration system that relies just on compressed air. Williams, 26, knew that forcing compressed air through a hole in the middle of a pipe causes hot and cold air to flow from opposite ends, a phenomenon known as the Ranque-Hilsch vortex-tube effect. No one is quite sure how the separation […]