This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American
Science fared pretty well at this year's Academy Awards. Case in point: Here's Best Actor Eddie Redmayne on Portraying Stephen Hawking. The Alan Turing biopic, The Imitation Game, also received multiple nominatians, and the mathematician who wrote the book on Turing told journalist Christopher Mims that The Imitation Gameis a fitting tribute to the man and his work. Related: Nerding out on the Computer Science in The Imitation Game. Also: Bletchley Park Codebreakers Also Created Brilliant Palindromes. One example: "Doc, note: I dissent. A fast never prevents a fatness. I diet on cod."
A Brief History of the Speed of Light, and how Glasgow physicists took two photons to the racetrack.
End of Era. Actor Leonard Nimoy, Spock of Star Trek, Dies at 83. Hero Complex offered a video retrospective, while Wil Wheaton (a.k.a. Wesley Crusher) offered his own remembrances. Obama On Leonard Nimoy: “I Loved Spock”: "Long before being nerdy was cool, there was Leonard Nimoy." NASA honors Nimoy: "an inspiration to multiple generations of engineers, scientists, astronauts, and other space explorers.”
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Caltech's theater program creates a new wonderland in Alice Through the Wormhole.
Dark Energy Camera Takes Accidental, Magnificent Photo of Comet Lovejoy.
Relaxing Higgs could explain matter dominance over antimatter. A new theory suggests the Higgs field varied in the early universe, offering matter a chance to split off from antimatter.
What Goes On Inside a Proton? That is the question, as the LHC gears up for another run. "Quarks and gluons make weird slopes and shapes inside the proton. Understanding them precisely was important for the first results from Cern’s Large Hadron Collider, and continues to be so as we approach the restart over the next few weeks."
LHC experiments prep for restart. "The giant endcaps of the ATLAS detector are back in position and the wheels of the CMS detector are moving it back into its “closed” configuration. The huge red door of the ALICE experiment is closed up ready for restart, and the access door to the LHC tunnel is sealed with concrete blocks."
Physics in fast-forward. During their first run in 2010, experiments at the Large Hadron Collider rediscovered 50 years' worth of physics research in a single month. “We can’t say we found a new particle unless we find all the old ones first,” says Fermilab senior scientist Dan Green. “Well, you can, but you would be wrong.”
Updated look at Milky Way’s rotation strengthens the case for dark matter.
The Mathematics Behind Getting All That Damned Snow Off Your Street.
"Wake up sheeple!" How to prevent a sheep traffic jam. Studying flocks of sheep moving through a bottleneck could help prevent human gridlock.
Despite claims by NASA and private outfits such as Mars One, we don’t have the know-how or funding to send people to the Red Planet, according to many scientists, policy experts, and one outspoken lawmaker. “To say we have put the cart before the horse is an understatement,” Rep. Dana Rohrabacher said.
The building blocks of the future: A new logic-defying mathematical model could lead to materials for better skin grafts and new smart materials.
The Physics of a Record Breaking Long Jump.
World View Parafoil Test Flight Touches Edge of Space. A private company that aims to send tourists to the edge of space broke a record by flying a parafoil higher than anyone has before.
Nostalgia Just Became a Law of Nature: New theories have mixed perception and knowledge into the hardest of sciences. "Here is the melancholy of a forgotten memory, a childhood room packed into boxes, the irrecoverable details of an afternoon drizzle, appearing quite literally in physical law."
Optics in Ancient China were more advanced than many people realize.
Five Ways Fractals Aren’t Just for Nature Anymore: Street maps, image compression, heartbeats and more.
How Video Game Breasts Are Made (And Why Their Physics Can Go So Horribly Wrong). "If you've played games that have breast physics, you've probably seen how uncommon it is for games to show breasts that move like what they actually are: bags of fat affected by gravity. Instead, it's more likely for a game to depict breasts as helium balloons that have minds of their own."
How Can Space Travel Faster Than The Speed Of Light? Related: Vsauce Shines a Light on the Complicated Answer to the Question, ‘Would Headlights Work at Light Speed?’
Mathematicians Work Out Zombie Apocalypse Plan.
The Physics Behind the Silver Screen, specifically, the physics of the movie projector and how changing technologies are affecting the movie-going experience.
How Well Do You Know Einstein? Take the quiz.
If you’ve ever blown across the top of a bottle to make it play a note, then you’ve created a Helmholtz resonator.
Computational Anthropology Reveals How The Most Important People in History Vary by Culture. Data mining Wikipedia people reveals some surprising differences in the way eastern and western cultures identify important figures in history.
How Not to Control the Weather for Your Dog. "the amount of stuff you can cool with lasers is really tiny.”
Tricksy Mars may be Obscuring Signs of Organic Matter.
Gigantic Black Hole Discovered From the Dawn of Time. Astronomers find a cosmic monster that pushes theories of the early universe to the limit.
Genetic Geometry Takes Shape. Inside the cell’s nucleus, the double helix folds up in myriad loops and twists. The quest to unravel this structure is revealing the subtle genetic orchestration of all life on Earth.
Nanotech Converts Conventional LCDs into Glasses-Free 3-D Displays to produce Princess Leia-style holograms. "Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope."
What are eyelashes for? To control air flow over the cornea, according to a new theory. Related: There Is A Mathematical Formula That Dictates How Long Your Lashes Are.
Celebrating Theoretical Physics at Caltech's shiny new Burke Institute.
Who Speaks for Earth? The Controversy over Interstellar Messaging.
Beyond Hubble: The MUSE instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope has given astronomers the best ever 3-D view of the deep Universe - in just 27 hours.
The Beautiful Art of Meteorite Science, according to Denton Ebel, curator of the American Museum of Natural History’s Meteorites division. "Ebel, along with fellow AMNH meteorite specialists Ellen Crapster-Pregont and Amanda White, showed off some of the more visually stunning techniques for determining the composition of the meteorites."
The Time Everyone “Corrected” the World’s Smartest Woman. "The outcry was so tremendous that vos Savant was forced to devote three subsequent columns to explaining why her logic was correct. Even in the wake of her well-stated, clear responses, she continued to be berated. “I still think you’re wrong,” wrote one man, nearly a year later. “There is such a thing as female logic.” Yet, the numbers behind vos Savant's conclusion don't lie."
CT Scan of 1,000-Year-Old Buddha Statue Reveals Mummified Monk Hidden Inside.
Mario Livio on 25 Years of Hubble: The astrophysicist looks at the history of the world’s most famous telescope.
Hunting Black Holes at the South Pole.
Bayes' Theorem, key to understanding real-world probabilities, made simple with Lego, by "Count Baysie."
Planetary science: The Pluto siblings. Leslie and Eliot Young have spent their lives studying Pluto. Now they are gearing up for the biggest event of their careers.
How to Make Quick and Easy Mini-Rockets From Simple Tea Bags.
Why Black Holes Barf Scorching Winds of High-Energy X-Rays.
The Quest to Conquer the Stratosphere: Soon, A Giant Balloon Could Leisurely Float You To The Edge Of Space.
An Eerie Geiger Counter Chandelier That Flashes and Clicks When It Detects Nearby Radiation by artist Phillip David Stearns. "According to Stearns, if the sculpture ever fully illuminates, it is an indication of fatal levels of ambient radiation."
A ChandelierFor One of Many Possible Ends from Phillip Stearns on Vimeo.
Physicists in biology, inverse problems and other quirks of the genomic age.
The latest from Bad Science Poet: Remember: “It’s not the science that’s bad—it’s the poetry!”™
Why Do We Pay Pure Mathematicians? Or, the Many Uses of Uselessness. "[T]ake any random paper written by an early 20th-century logician, and you could call it similarly pointless. If you eliminated that paper from the timeline, the Jenga tower of our intellectual history would remain perfectly upright. That doesn’t make those papers worthless, because research isn’t a collection of separable monologues. It’s a dialogue."
Catch of the day: mathematician nets weird, complex fish. Young maths whizz from Iran uses simple equations to paint stunning images that bizarrely look like marine objects, and makes a fractal Africa.
Meet 10-Year-Old Math Genius Esther Okade, Already Killing It At University.
Birth of a Theorem: A Mathematical Adventure by Cédric Villani – book review of what the Guardian calls "the compelling and uncompromising diary of a prizewinning French enthusiast and eccentric ....To really appreciate mathematics, you have to see it evolve, to work through the twists and turns yourself; it’s almost never enough for someone to just tell you about it."
"Life is Strange," An Episodic Adventure Game Featuring a Protagonist That Can Rewind Time.
Kepler-432b is a doomed planet orbiting a doomed star.
Can God Lie? How the Scientific Revolution made an honest man of God.
Scientists now have uranium by the balls — balls of iron nanoparticles, that is.
Lone physicist in Congress -- Bill Foster (D-IL) -- joins science panel.
How to Create a Homemade Gatling Gun From PVC Piping That Fires Meatballs in Rapid Succession. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?