So much science-y goodness this past week! First up: I have a post at the newly launched Nautilus on the physics of the blues, focusing on the work of J. Murray Gibson. It’s all about the development of the “blue note” and how music, and our perception of musical notes, can shed light on the [...]

Living in Los Angeles for the last six years, I’ve become quite familiar with the spread of wildfires, with a corresponding deepening respect for Nature’s power. Given the devastation an out-of-control wildfire can cause, it’s not surprising that there’s been quite a bit of research into modeling the specifics of how forest fires spread over [...]

Many viewers who tuned into American Idol on April 4th expected the dismissal of Lazaro Arbos, a likeable young man with an endearing stutter but marginal talent and an unfortunate tendency to forget lyrics. They were stunned when Burnell Taylor was eliminated instead. Arbos inexplicably wound up in the top three of the remaining contestants, [...]

It was a busy week! I hosted an hour-long discussion with Maria Konnikova, my SciAm bloggy sibling and author of Mastermind: How To Think Like Sherlock Holmes, in Second Life as part of Virtually Speaking Science. (If you missed it, I hosted astrophysicist Janna Levin back in April.) I also chatted with the folks at [...]

This week saw the launch of a new science-and-culture magazine, Nautilus, with both print and online versions. I’ll be contributing regular blog posts to the site. First up: the psychological necessity of storytelling. To find out more, Matt Shipman talked to digital editor Amos Zeeburg. We’ve Got Data. A bunch of high school physics students [...]

First things first: There is a movement afoot of sorts within certain sectors of the high-energy physics community to rename the Higgs boson to better reflect all those who contributed to its theoretical development and eventual discovery. Sure, it’s named after Peter Higgs, and has been called that for decades in the academic literature and [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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% [...]