In July 2010, the editorial department of Scientific American—where at the time I was on staff—received a review copy of a book was slated to come out in September. It was a slim, drab-looking, paperback-bound volume, still without a cover design or page numbers. On the cover it carried two names, that of a respected [...]

A magnetic sense is now well documented in dozens of animal species. It turns out that tracking the geomagnetic field—that same invisible thing that points compasses—is handy for life, in lots of situations. Using their internal compasses, naked mole rats in Africa navigate their pitch-black underground mazes. Lobsters off Bermuda find their way to regions [...]

–Come in, Dave. Dave, come in. Do you read me, Dave? Please come in, Dave. –Wh… where am I? –I am glad you are waking up, Dave. Your vital signs were fairly normal but I was having difficulties reawakening you. –What happened? –I am still running checks to assess the situation. –My head hurts … [...]

  They call it “the machine.” Thousands of physicists working at the LHC are looking for the Higgs boson and other new particles, and many of them have contributed to building the gigantic detectors that are taking most of the media limelight these days. But humming 100 meters under the Franco-Swiss border is the apparatus [...]

On December 13, CERN will release the results of a new data analysis in the search for the Higgs boson. at the LHC. As I was reporting my article, which appeared today, on December 7 I spoke on the phone with Joe Lykken, a Fermilab staff theoretical physicist. Lykken is a member of the CMS [...]

On the night of December 6, 1979–32 years ago today–Alan Guth had the “spectacular realization” that would soon turn cosmology on its head. He imagined a mind-bogglingly brief event, at the very beginning of the big bang, during which the entire universe expanded exponentially, going from microscopic to cosmic size. That night was the birth [...]

In my previous post, I described the little-known and somewhat counterintuitive idea that objects in the distant universe appear larger and larger the farther they are, in a reversal of the usual rules of perspective. I called it the cosmic magnifying lens. As promised, I will now explain the physics behind it. One possible way [...]

The observable universe is one big, giant magnifying lens. At large distances, objects appear to be larger than their true size, and the farther they are, the bigger they look. The most distant observable objects are so magnified that their images in the sky—if we could see them—would be blown up by a factor of [...]

The piece run by The Atlantic last week on the Nobel Prizes for Physics, sadly, contained a number of misleading or inaccurate statements on physics and cosmology. Gregg Easterbrook, the journalist who wrote it, has a storied past as a science writer. He was one of the clear-minded people who saw early on the nonsense [...]

How did I miss this until now? This clip has apparently been making the rounds of the Interwebs for years, but I couldn’t resist posting it after I saw it on Facebook this morning. I have no idea where the article was published–nor whether it’s a joke–though the news may have originated from a 2005 [...]